Associate Members and Project Partners
Associate Members
Dr. Sarah Rebecca Schmid
Teaching and Research Assistant Japanese Studies
Head Curator Digital Humanities JBAE
Contact:
E-mail: sarahrebecca.schmid@uzh.ch
Tel.: +41 44 634 31 82
"I received my doctorate in 2022 from the Doctoral Programme “Asia and Europe” of the University of Zurich. I am currently a postdoc at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at the University of Zurich, where I both conducts research and teach Japanese Studies. My research interests include mythological narratives, conceptions of death and the afterlife, and the use of images in religious instruction and
practice"
practice"
Nahoko Suzuki. M.A.
Doctoral Fellow
E-mail: nahoko.suzuki@uzh.ch
"I am a PhD student at the University of Zurich. My research centers on dreams in ancient and medieval Japanese literature. In my Bachelor’s thesis, I compared dream episodes occurring in the imperial chronicles Kojiki and Nihon shoki, both compiled in the 8th century, including their mythological contexts. In my Master’s thesis, I broadened my research focus by investigating dream episodes in Japanese and Germanic mythology. My investigations on both the Bachelor’s and Master’s levels disclosed that dreams function as a medium to connect this world to the otherworld, while Japanese mythological dreams are also characterized by their function as a sacred means of problem solving. The aim of my dissertation project is to conduct a diachronic and intertextual survey of sword dreams in ancient and medieval Japanese texts."
Berfu Sengün, MA
PhD Candidate
E-mail: berfu.senguen@uzh.ch
I am a PhD Candidate examining the narratological aspects of The Tale of Genji through Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel, focusing mainly on time, space, character, and narrative discourse. My doctoral dissertation investigates the spatio-temporal structures of the Ten Tamakazura Chapters (Tamakazura Jūjō), borrowing from Bakthin's literary chronotope and Gérard Genette's main concepts from his work, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. I aim to pursue innovative research that has a meaningful impact on World Literature while further developing my expertise in Premodern Japanese Literature.
Project Partners
Prof. Mina Akaishi
is a computer scientist at Hosei University who has developed a program that creates word embedding networks on the basis of the frequency of characters.
Prof. Claire-Akiko Brisset
from the University of Geneva is a specialist in the relations between text and image/orality and the circulation of narrative motifs in medieval setsuwa literature.
Prof. Tabuchi Kumiko
from Waseda University is a leading specialist in medieval Japanese literature, spanning poetry, diaries, and court tales alike.
Prof. Michael Watson
is professor emeritus at Meiji Gakuin University, a specialist in medieval war tales and one of the few Japanologists who makes use of narratological approaches in his research.
Associate Project Partners
Prof. Daniel Schley
from Bonn University is a historian and specialist in historical tales. He has worked on questions of fictionality and on time-related issues in historical text of ancient and medieval Japan.
Prof. Raji Steineck
from the University of Zurich is a philosopher and specialist in medieval Buddhism, notably of Dōgen, the founder of the Sōtō school of Zen Buddhism. He dedicated a lot of his efforts to further developing the theory of symbolic forms (established by Ernst Cassirer) by bringing it into conversation with Japanese cultural history. From 2017 until 2023 he was the PI of the Horizon Eurpoe funded ERC Advanced Grant Time im Medieval Japan (TIMEJ).