Kristin H. Williams
kwillia6@wellesley.edu
(781) 283-2945
East Asian Languages & Cultures
B.A., Mary Baldwin College; M.A., University of Pennsylvania, M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University
Green Hall Rm. 238D
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in East Asian Languages and Cultures
Research in Japanese literature, children’s culture, and book history of the 17th to 19th century.
My research interests center on Japanese woodblock print culture of the 17th to 19th centuries and especially on woodblock-printed children’s books from this period. I have studied and translated children’s picturebooks of 18th century Japan. I am also interested in the intersections between children’s literature and textbooks of this time.
I will be teaching courses on Japanese children’s culture, both in English translation and in Japanese, as well as a first-year seminar on illustrated literature in Japan.
Because of my interest in Japanese book history, I have been involved in surveying and cataloging rare Japanese books at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and I have studied kuzushiji, a cursive style of calligraphy common in Japanese books from the 17th and 18th century.
