DAVID C. ATHERTON
Thorley D. Briggs 1953 Associate Professor of the Humanities
David C. Atherton is a scholar of literature, focusing primarily on Japan’s early modern period (also known as the Edo or Tokugawa period, ca. 1600-1867). His work seeks to understand how the intrinsic, literary dynamics of early modern texts interacted with and shaped the social, cultural, and political worlds beyond the page in an age of burgeoning literacy and flourishing manuscript and print culture.
His first book, Writing Violence: The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature (Columbia University Press, 2023) offers a new approach to understanding the challenging formal features of Edo-period popular fiction. Focusing on depictions of violence—one of the most fraught topics for a peaceful polity ruled over by warriors—the book reveals how the seemingly formulaic dynamics of early modern literature had the potential to alter the perception of time and space, make social and economic forces visible, defamiliarize conventions, give voice to the socially peripheral, and reshape the contours of community. Writing Violence was named a 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and was described in Monumenta Nipponica as “a revelatory work…that will surely become a milestone in the study of early modern Japanese literature.” An interview about the book is available for listening here.
Atherton is currently writing a second book, The Postponed Death of the Author: Creativity at the Edge of Life in Early Modern Japan. The book explores early modern creative selfhood and the social and aesthetic uses of authorship through the genre-bending, eccentrically self-referential late works of the polymathic writer Ueda Akinari (1734-1809).
Atherton’s recent publications in journals and edited volumes include: “The Invention of Authorship in Early Modern Japan: Theorizing Commercial Creativity in the Fiction of Miyako no Nishiki,” (The Journal of Japanese Studies, 2025); “The Author as Protagonist: Professionalizing the Craft of the Kusazōshi Writer,” (Monumenta Nipponica, 2020); “Ideal Families in Crisis: Official and Fictional Archetypes at the Turn of the 19th Century” (in What Is a Family? Answers from Early Modern Japan, University of California Press, 2019); and “Space, Identity, and Self-Definition: The Forest in Khun Chang Khun Phaen,” (in Five Studies on Khun Chang Khun Phaen: The Many Faces of a Thai Literary Classic, University of Washington Press, 2017).
Atherton received his Ph.D. in Japanese literature from Columbia University in 2013. He holds an M.A. in classical Thai literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2006) and an A.B. from Harvard, where he focused on Chinese literature and film (2000). Prior to joining EALC, he taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He teaches a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses on Japanese literature and culture, as well as the popular Gen Ed course “Creativity.” He is a recipient of the Roslyn Abramson Award for “excellence and sensitivity in teaching undergraduates,” awarded by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Everett Mendelsohn Award for Excellence in Mentoring, awarded by the Harvard Graduate Student Council. He was voted a “Favorite Professor” by the Class of 2025.