Scholarship and Biography
Matthew Fraleigh is Associate Professor of East Asian Literature and Culture at Brandeis University. His research concerns the literature of early modern and modern Japan, especially kanshibun (Sinitic poetry and prose). 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 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). He has also recently collaborated with scholar and translator of Chinese classical poetry Jonathan Chaves, to produce a co-authored volume titled The Same Moon Shines on All: The Lives and Selected Poems of Yanagawa Seigan and Kōran (Columbia UP, 2024). The volume features Chaves’s translations of two hundred poems by two of the most prominent Sinitic poets of nineteenth 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 Sinitic poetry.