Sumie Jones

Sumie Jones is Professor Emerita of comparative literature, East Asian language and cultures, and film studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she taught from 1978 to 2007. She also served as a Residential Fellow at Indiana University's Institute for Advanced Study from 2008 to 2020. 

              

She has held visiting positions at Harvard University (as a Bunting Fellow at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Japan Institute), at the University of Tokyo (as a Research Fellow), at the International Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto (as a Visiting Professor), and Rikkyo University, Tokyo, as a Visiting Research Fellow. 

 

The areas of her specialty include 18th-century comparative literature and arts (English, French, Chinese and Japanese), early modern Japanese literature and arts, 1600-1920, Japanese film and theater, and comparative study of gender and sexuality in literature and arts. She has written many books and articles and delivered lectures, papers, and speeches in both English and Japanese. 

 

She is known for her unique interpretation of literary, visual, and dramatic texts based on a close reading of the works from the perspectives of psychoanalysis, semiotics, and theories of gender and sexuality. Her chief interest is in the relationship between word and image, and in the relationship between the text and its reader/spectator. 

 

With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Japan Foundation, the Toshiba International Foundation, Suntory Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, American Council of Learned Societies, and Social Science Research Council, she has led large-scale collaborative research projects, including a three-volume anthology in English of early modern Japanese popular culture, and organized international conferences, including one on the Tale of Genji and another on sexuality and gender in Edo-period culture in Japan.

 

joness@indiana.edu