Academic & Teaching staff

Irena Hayter

Sasakawa Lecturer in Japanese Studies

About Dr Irena Hayter

My current research focuses on Japanese literature and visual culture in the 1920s and 1930s. I am interested in the relations between historical and cultural form (e.g. visuality, cinema and modernity; modernism and advanced capitalism). Theoretically, my work is grounded in Marxist and historicist approaches, as well as in psychoanalysis. 

Key Publications and Activities

Articles

    • 'In the Flesh: The Historical Unconscious of Ishikawa Jun's Fugen', in Nina Cornyetz and J. Keith Vincent (eds) Perversion in Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture, London: Routledge, 2009, pp. 201-220. 
    • 'Wagahai wa neko de aru satsujin jiken as a Postmodern Sequel' in Eiji Sekine (ed.), Japanese Narrativity and Poeticity Revisited, West Lafayette, Indiana: Association for Japanese Literary Studies, Purdue University, 2003, pp. 332-344. (PAJLS: Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies, vol.4) 
    • (with Bratislav Ivanov) 'Za rolyata na ieroglifite v kitaskiya leksikalen plast na yaponskiya ezik' (On the role of characters in the Chinese lexical level of Japanese) (in Bulgarian), Sapostavitelno ezikoznanie/Contrastive Linguistics 20:2 (1995), pp. 80-88. 

Translations

'Edna ruka' (An Arm) (Translation of Kawabata Yasunari's 'Kata ude' into Bulgarian), Literaturen vestnik 20 (1996), pp. 8-9, 12-13.

Selected Conference Papers

 

    • 'Reproductions of the Self: Dazai Osamu'. Technology and Japanese Literary, Film and Performance Studies. Nineteenth meeting of the Associaltion for Japanese Literary Studies (AJLS), 15-17 October 2010, Yale University.
    • 'Film, Fascism, Psychoanalysis: Japan, circa 1936'. Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Approaches to Japanese Cinema, 10-11 May 2010, Leeds Humanities Research Institute.
    • 'A Postmodern Nationalism? Form and Ideology in Japanese Film'.  Tenth Asian Studies Conference Japan, 24-25 June 2006, International Christian University, Japan.
    • 'Ishikawa Jun's Fugen, or the Political Unconscious of Modernism'. Eleventh annual meeting of the European Association for Japanese Studies, 31 August-3 September 2005, University of Vienna, Austria. 
    • 'Takami Jun and the Politics of Representation'. Joint East Asian Studies Conference, 6-8 September 2004, Bretton Hall, University of Leeds.

Teaching (Undergraduate)

  • EAST1266 Japan: A Cultural History from Buddhism to Murakami Haruki
  • EAST3264 Advanced Japanese in Context: Literature 
  • EAST3265 Advanced Japanese in Context: Culture and Identity
  • EAST3256 Narratives of Japanese Modernity: Fiction and Film

Teaching (Postgraduate)

  • MODL 5236 Specialized Japanese-English Translation