THOMPSON Mathew

Associate Professor
Premodern Japanese Literature

B.A., Yale University
M.A., Ph.D., Columbia University

Research and Teaching Interests：
My research focuses on the representation of samurai and warfare in Muromachi and Tokugawa period literature. Several topics, in particular, have captured my attention: the corpus of narratives contributing to the legend of Minamoto no Yoshitsune, the narratology of performance-based genres such as ko-jôruri and kôwakamai librettos, and the transmission and (re)imagination of the medieval past in early modern society. Aside from working on several journal articles and the ‘translation’ of my dissertation into a monograph, I am also involved in the production of new game-based teaching materials for Japanese history and literature, as well as a symposium on the construction of samurai identity in the seventeenth century to take place in December of 2012 at Sophia University.