DAVID C. ATHERTON
Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
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). He is concerned with understanding how the intrinsic, literary dynamics of early modern texts interacted with and shaped the social, cultural, and political worlds beyond the page. 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 literature. Focusing on depictions of violence—one of the most fraught topics for a peaceful polity ruled over by warriors—he connects concepts of form and formalization across the aesthetic and social spheres, revealing 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.
He is at work on a second book, How to Do Things with Words in Eighteenth-Century Japan: Ueda Akinari and the Powers of Style. The book demonstrates how newfound attention to literary style in the eighteenth century served as an intersection point for transformative understandings of the nature of language, the import of reading, the dynamics of creativity, and the relationship between writing and life.
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, forthcoming 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” (What Is a Family? Answers from Early Modern Japan, 2019); and “Space, Identity, and Self-Definition: The Forest in Khun Chang Khun Phaen,” (Five Studies on Khun Chang Khun Phaen: The Many Faces of a Thai Literary Classic, 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, Professor Atherton taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He teaches a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses in Japanese literature and culture, as well as the Gen Ed course “Creativity.” He is a recipient of the Rosalyn Abramson Award for “outstanding undergraduate teaching.
Professor 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, Professor Atherton taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder.