Matthew Fraleigh

Matthew Fraleigh is associate professor of East Asian Literature and Culture at Brandeis University, where he chairs the Program in East Asian Studies. His research focuses on the literature of Japan from a comparative approach. He has published two books focused on the nineteenth century Sinological scholar, poet, and journalist Narushima Ryūhoku: a study entitled Plucking Chrysanthemums: Narushima Ryūhoku and Sinitic Literary Traditions in Modern Japan (Harvard, 2016), and an annotated translation, New Chronicles of Yanagibashi and Diary of a Journey to the West: Narushima Ryūhoku Reports From Home and Abroad (Cornell, 2010). He is broadly interested in Sino-Japanese cultural exchange from antiquity through the modern period and has published a volume co-edited with historian Joshua Fogel called Sino-Japanese Reflections: Literary and Cultural Interactions between China and Japan in Early Modernity (De Gruyter, 2022), as well as a recent collaboration with scholar and translator of Chinese classical poetry Jonathan Chaves on The Same Moon Shines on All: The Lives and Selected Poems of Yanagawa Seigan and Kōran (Columbia, 2024). The volume features Chaves’s translations of two hundred poems by two of the most prominent Sinitic poets of 19^th century Japan and Fraleigh’s substantial introduction to the couple (who were married to each other), and the literary and political context in which they worked. He is currently finishing a book project that explores seventeenth to nineteenth century Japanese theoretical discourse concerning classical Chinese poetry. While at University of Michigan, he will also continue working on a new project that examines Sinitic poetry in postwar Japan.