Biography

I was born in the United Kingdom and grew up in Cádiz, Spain. For my undergraduate degree I majored in Japanese at SOAS, University of London. I then spent six years in Sapporo, where I graduated with an MA in Japanese literature from Hokkaidō University. I first came to the United States in 1999, to enter a PhD program in premodern Japanese literature at Columbia University in New York. My first job as a professor was at the University of Pittsburgh, where I worked for two years before coming to UCLA in 2007.

I teach a variety of undergraduate courses, including classical poetry, literature of the supernatural, classical Japanese and a GE course on Japanese civilization.

At the graduate level I teach courses for PhD students on various topics, depending on their interests. In recent years I have taught courses on mythology, classical poetry, historical writing, and Heian period vernacular prose writings. I also teach a survey graduate course on literature from the earliest times to 1600 every three years.

I research and publish on a variety of topics about early and classical Japan, focusing mainly on poetry, mythology, historical writing, and the relationship between literature and the state. I am also interested in classical scholarship during the medieval, early modern, and modern periods.

I am the author of Poesía clásica japonesa: Kokinwakashū (Editorial Trotta, 2005); Man’yōshū and the Imperial Imagination in Early Japan (Brill, 2014) and its Japanese translation and revised edition, Man’yōshū to teikokuteki sōzō (Kachōsha, 2023); and The Kokinshū: Selected Poems (Columbia University Press, 2023).

At present I am working on two book projects: an edited volume of essays on early Japanese literature, and a book of translations and commentary on the poetry of Hitomaro.