Edward Kamens

Edward Kamens is Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies at Yale University, where he has taught since 1986. He has published books and articles on Buddhism in Japanese literature, classical poetry, and literary interactions with the visual arts, and he is currently directing a digital humanities research project focused on a seventheenth-century calligraphy album in the Beinecke Library (“The Tekagamijō”). From 1998 to 2008 he was associate head of Saybrook College and served as head in 2009 and 2011. Kamens has been chair of the East Asian Languages and Literatures for several terms and also has served a term as acting director of the Whitney Humanities Center. He was the founding chair of Yale’s Committee on Language Study and helped launch Yale’s highly successful Richard U. Light Fellowship (for the study of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in East Asia). His teaching covers Japanese literature from the earliest periods into the nineteenth century. Major publications include “Waka and Things, Waka as Things” (2017); “Utamakura, Allusion and Intertextuality in Traditional Japanese Poetry” (1997); “The Buddhist Poetry of the Great Kamo Priestess: Daisaiin Senshi and Hosshin wakashū” (1990); “The Three Jewels: A Study and Translation of Minamoto Tamenori’s Sanbōe” (1988); “Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries” ed. with Mikael Adolphson and Stacie Matsumoto (2007); and articles in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and Journal of Japanese Studies. Professor Kamens (“Ed”) currently resides in Los Angeles with his wife, Sterling Professor Emeritus and former Dean of Yale College Mary Miller, and retired from Yale in 2022.