Chelsea Ward

Chelsea Ward studies modern Japanese literature, with an emphasis on Taishô and early Shôwa prose and poetry. She received her B.A. in 2009 from Columbia University, earning honors for a senior thesis on Jun'ichirô Tanizaki's early encounters with Kyoto and the Kansai region as imaginative space for the reconstruction of a traditional Japan. She is currently working on the reception and circulation of Western Imagist appropriations of canonical East Asian texts amongst the Japanese and Sinophone avant-garde. She also hopes to examine the relationship between German philosophical traditions, the Kyoto School, and the mid-century popularization of Zen Buddhism in the United States. Outside the East Asian Languages and Cultures department, she maintains active interests in musicology, affect theory, Objectivist and Postmodern poetry, and Catalan literature.