Edward Kamens
Sumitomo Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures
Ed Kamens, B.A. Ph.D. Yale University, faculty member at Yale since 1986: You are a professor of Japanese literature, with emphasis on the poetry and prose of the Nara, Heian, and Kamakura periods. Your scholarly work through four books, translations, editions, articles, and teaching has placed you at the center of your field.
Your colleagues have said that no scholar has done more to bring premodern Japanese court poetry into such a wide range of conversations across so many disciplines. Your most widely read and cited work may be Utamakura, Allusion, and Intertextuality in Traditional Japanese Poetry, which investigates the deeply intertextual and allusive nature of Japanese poetry through a sustained study of the use of place names as an important rhetorical device. All your work has been groundbreaking, starting with your earliest book on the Buddhist poetry of the Great Kamo priestess and including your most recent book, Waka and Things, Waka as Things (2017).
This latest work brings art history into conversation with literature, highlighting Japanese traditions that incorporated poetic recitation, calligraphy, architecture, painting, and sculpture in ritual and secular spaces. That truly interdisciplinary work makes you a maverick in a field that has historically been more insular. You work capaciously across boundaries to explore how early Japanese poets created, read, and integrated poetry into their lives and experiences.
You are also currently engaged in coordinating the Tekagami-jō Project with the goal of producing a complete interactive digital presentation of this 17th-century calligraphy masters’ sampler based on research by an international team of scholars, curators, conservators, and materials scientists.
These are some of the facts. But beyond facts, there is the character of your work, which your colleagues say defines you. You are a scholar of poetry with the soul of a poet who has a deep and abiding concern for the poems.
Beyond your many external contributions to societies, journals, and advisory boards, the service you have given Yale, your alma mater, is extraordinary. You have been Chair, Director of Undergraduate Studies, and Director of Graduate Studies of your department; associate head of Saybrook College for sixteen years; and member of so many committees, including the Tenure and Appointments Committee, the Faculty Committee on Athletics, the Graduate School Degree Committee, and the Theatre Studies Advisory Committee. Listing them all here would fill the entire tribute.
It is said that a great poem is great because it speaks to the present across time and across oceans and across people. For your years of distinguished work and for your exceptional devotion and service to your alma mater, the Yale College faculty thanks you for being an exemplar of the Yale motto, lux et veritas.