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Dr. Daniel Poch
PhD Columbia University (2014)

Associate Professor

Email: dpoch@hku.hk

Daniel Poch


Daniel specializes in early modern and modern Japanese literature. His first monograph, Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel (Columbia University Press, 2020), examines the significance of “human emotion” (ninjō)—a historical term for amorous feeling and erotic desire—in defining the canon of the novel in nineteenth-century Japan. This study offers a new integrative perspective on the Japanese novel that challenges the disciplinary divide between Edo and Meiji studies and also highlights important continuities with Chinese literary discourse and fiction.

His second book project, funded by a recent GRF grant, investigates the intersections of aesthetic and psychological knowledge in the formation of modern Japanese literature from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries.

Daniel has received fellowships and research grants from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes), the German Academic Exchange Service, the Canon Foundation in Europe, the Japan Foundation, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), and the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (ECS grant in 2016–17; GRF grant in 2022–23). He is also the recipient of an Arts Faculty Research Award for Junior Tenure-track Professoriate Staff (2020) and of the Arts Faculty Research Output Prize (2021).

Selected Publications
Monograph
1) Licentious Fictions: Ninjō and the Nineteenth-Century Japanese Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). (click here for link)
Journal Articles (peer-reviewed)
1)
“Between Sterility and Ecstasy: Sexual Perversion, Gender Ambivalence, and Aesthetics in Mori Ōgai’s Literary Fiction.”The Journal of Asian Studies. Forthcoming.
2)
“Reclaiming Ethics Through Love: “Literature” in Natsume Sōseki’s Novel Sorekara.” Japan Forum 33.3 (2021): 402–423 (click here for link)
3) “Translation, Human Emotion, and the Bildungsroman in Meiji Japan: Narrating Passion and Spiritual Love in the Novel Karyū shunwa.” Japanese Language and Literature 53.1 (2019): 63–93. (click here for link)
4)
“Measuring Feeling as Theory of Literature: Romanticism and the Performance of Genre in Natsume Sōseki’s Kusamakura and Critical Writings.” Monumenta Nipponica 73.1 (2018): 1–26. (click here for link)
Book Chapters
1)
“El género shaseibun entre la novela y la poesía tradicional” [The Genre Shaseibun (Sketch Prose) Between the Novel and Traditional Poetry]. In Paula Hoyos Hattori and Ariel Stilerman. Eds. El Archipiélago: Ensayos para una historia cultural del Japón, 89–98. Buenos Aires: Lomo, 2018.
2)
“Kanjō hyōgen toshite no ‘bun’ no kindai: Natsume Sōseki Kusamakura ni okeru shiika to shizen to ‘romanshugi’” [Literary Modernity and Emotional Expression: Poetry, Nature, and Romanticism in Natsume Sōseki’s Kusamakura]. In Kōno Kimiko and Wiebke Denecke. Eds. Nihon ni okeru “bun” to “bungaku,” 221–33. Tokyo: Bensei shuppan, 2013.
Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan


Selected Courses

JAPN1011 Introduction to Japanese Studies
JAPN2071 Introduction to Modern Japanese Literature
JAPN2087 Introduction to Japanese Literature: Beginnings to 1900
JAPN2095 Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japanese Literature
JAPN3007 Translation Japanese-English: Reading and Translating Modern Japanese Literature
JAPN3034 Introduction to Classical Japanese (Bungo)
JAPN4101 Japanese Studies Research Project: Capstone Experience

Contact Details
Office: Room 5.35, Run Run Shaw Tower
Email: dpoch@hku.hk
HKU Scholars Hub: http://hub.hku.hk/cris/rp/rp01951

Japanese Studies HKU