Jeffrey Niedermaier joined the departments of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University in 2021. A scholar of the literature and poetry of premodern Japan, he works on texts composed in the classical Japanese language as well as in literary Chinese. His primary research investigates how Japanese vernacular “songs” (waka) and Chinese-inscribed “belles-lettres” (kanshibun) were leveraged in order to situate the local within a pluricentric, trans-Asian ecumene of Chinese-writing communities known as the “Sinographic Sphere.” He is curious about how hybrid literary writings contribute to the imagination of a wider world and variegated abroads.
Interested broadly in methodologies of comparison and the textures of multilingualism, he works in several dead and living Asian and European languages. He studies and teaches topics in premodern Japanese literature and culture as well as comparative poetics, cosmopolitan literacies, and world literature.
His book in progress, The Poetics of Elsewhere, explores how a millennium-old tradition of “resonant verse” transported readers to locales beyond the walls of China and shorelines of Japan, as far as Persia, Parhae, and, eventually, Portugal. At an earlier stage, this project was supported by a Fulbright-Hays fellowship for research in Tokyo. Supported by fellowships from Yale, Brown, and the U.S. Department of Education, his research has appeared in The Journal of World Literature and Asiatische Studien - Études asiatiques. He is also preparing a translation of the Wakan rōeishū (The Collection of Japanese & Chinese resonant verse, 1010s ce).
He holds an AB in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Japanese literature from Yale University.
