Assistant Professor of Japanese
Ph.D., Columbia University in the city of New York

Areas of Interest

Premodern Japanese literature, history, and religion; Japanese mythology and its reception; canonization of Japanese literature; Classical Chinese writing in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam; 8th century Japanese poetry and prose; narrative and narratology.

Biography

Matthieu Felt teaches courses on Japanese literature and culture. After receiving his Ph.D. in Japanese literature from Columbia University in 2017, he spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies. He is the author of Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2023), which examines the varying interpretations of mythical texts in pre-modern and early modern Japan. He is also active as a translator, including the introduction and translation of “Tale of the Dirt Spider,” in Monsters and the Fantastic: A Collection of Short Medieval Japanese Fiction, ed. Keller Kimbrough et al. (Columbia University Press, February 2018). His two-volume translation of The Chronicles of Japan, produced with the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities individual fellowship, is under contract with the Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature, Oxford University Press.