Jeffrey Angles
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Jeffrey Angles
Jeffrey Angles
Associate Professor and Advisor of Japanese
Japanese Literature and Translation Studies
Office: (269) 387-3044
Email: jeffrey.angles@wmich.edu
Office hours: Off campus until fall 2013
Location
419 Sprau Tower, Mail Stop 5338
Mailing Address
Department of World Languages and Literatures
Western Michigan University
1903 W Michigan Ave
Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5338 USA
Education
B.A. International Studies & Japanese, The Ohio State University, 1993
M.A. Japanese Literature, The Ohio State University, 1997
Research, International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Kyoto), 2000-2002
Ph.D. Japanese Literature, The Ohio State University, 2004
Background
Dr. Angles’ lifelong interest in Japan and Japanese literature began when he went to Yamaguchi Prefecture in southwestern Japan as a fifteen-year old exchange student. Since then, he has gone to Japan multiple times, spending several years working and studying in various cities, including Saitama City, Kobe, and Kyoto.
Teaching
Dr. Angles is the director of the Japanese language program, and the principal contact for students wishing to study abroad in Japan. In addition to Japanese language courses, he teaches courses on comparative and Japanese literature, comparative literature, and translation theory.
Research
Much of Dr. Angles’ work has focused on expressions of ideology within twentieth-century popular literature and film from Japan, especially of the modernist era. He earned his Ph.D. with a study of representations of same-sex desire in the literature of the interwar period, which he developed into a monograph published in 2011.
Other current research interests have to do with the ways that literary translation in Japan has spurred literary development both inside and outside of Japan. The International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan invited him to come as a visiting professor in 2009-2010 to conduct a major research project on the cultural history of translation.
Dr. Angles is also a prominent translator of modern Japanese literature. His translations of Tada Chimako, published by the University of California Press, received both the 2009 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission for the Translation of Japanese Literature and the 2011
Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. His translation projects have earned grants from the PEN Club of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Books
- Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Japanese Modernist Literature, (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
- Japan: A Traveler's Literary Companion, co-edited with J. Thomas Rimer
(Berkeley: Whereabouts Press, 2006).
Translations
- Forest of Eyes: Selected Poems of Tada Chimako, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
- Killing Kanoko: Selected Poems by Hiromi Itō, (South Bend, IN: Action Books, 2009).
Dr. Angles has published many other translations in other anthologies, including the following.
- Modanizumu: An Anthology of Japanese Modernist Prose, ed. William J. Tyler
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008).
- Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond, ed. Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar (NY: W.W. Norton, 2008).
- Japan: A Traveler's Literary Companion, ed. Jeffrey Angles and J. Thomas Rimer
(Berkeley: Whereabouts Press, 2006)
- The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, Volume 1: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945, ed. J. Thomas Rimer and Van Gessel (NY: Columbia University Press, 2005).
For a more complete account of Dr. Angles’ classes, articles, translations, and research activities, please visit his personal webpage.