Edward Kamens

Ed Kamens is Sumitomo Professor Emeritus of Japanese Studies. He received all his degrees from Yale (BA 1974, MA 1979, PhD 1982) and served on the faculty from 1986 to 2022. Previously he taught at Connecticut College, the University of Chicago, UCLA, and the University of Washington. Professor Kamen’s service at Yale included terms as chair and DGS in the Department of East Asian Languages, DGS for East Asian Studies, founding chair of the Committee on Language Study, interim director of the Whitney Humanities Center, associate head and head of Saybrook College, director and executive committee member of the Richard U. Light Fellowship Program,  chair of the Yale College Executive Committee, and as a member of the Humanities Tenure Appointments Committee. Over the years, he has also taken on committee memberships in the Association for Asian Studies, the Modern Language Association, the Society for Japanese Studies/Journal of Japanese Studies, the Center for Japanese Language Studies (Yokohama), and the Kyoto Center for Japanese Studies. He has held fellowships from The Japan Foundation and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Art and Culture.

Professor Kamens’s teaching and research engaged (and continues to engage) with pre-modern (a.k.a. “classical”) Japanese poetry and prose, with particular attention to Buddhist literature, visual culture, and the analysis of allusion and intertextuality. His current ongoing work focuses primarily on The Tekagamijō Project, presenting both online and in bilingual publication the results of an international team’s study of a late seventeenth-century calligraphy album held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Recent publications in both English and Japanese treat the genre of tekagami (calligraphy albums), poetry and poetics in The Tale of Genji, and the program of poems, songs, and screen paintings presented at the official banquets celebrating the enthronement of the current emperor of Japan in 2019.

In retirement, Ed enjoys piano practice, attending opera and other musical performances as often as possible both at home in Los Angeles and when traveling domestically and abroad, and reading fiction of all kinds.  He is a long-time interviewer in Yale’s Alumni Schools Committee and looks forward to continuing to contribute to the vitality of the university in this and other ways as both alumnus and emeritus faculty member.