Elizabeth Oyler

  • Associate Professor of Premodern Japanese Literature, Performance. Department chair.
  • Estuary: Historical Memory, Performance, Medical & Digital Humanities

Education & Training

  • PhD, Japanese, Stanford University, 1999
  • MA, Japanese, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1991
  • BA, Japanese with a Certificate in Asian Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 1988

Representative Publications

  • Cultural Imprints: War and Memory in the Samurai Age. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2022. Co-edited with Katherine Saltzman-Li
  • Swords, Oaths and Prophetic Visions: Authoring Warrior Rule in Medieval Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2006.
  • Like Clouds or Mists: Studies and Translations of Noh Plays of the Genpei War. Cornell East Asia Series, 2014. Co-editor, with Michael G. Watson.

Research Interests

My research is motivated by a fascination with the way historical and cultural memory are represented in literature and performing arts from Japan’s medieval period, particularly the fifteenth century. My first book focused on Japan’s most famous military tale, The Tales of the Heike, exploring its connections to and influences on both the writing and performing of the early age of Japan’s first shogunate. I am currently working on a book-length study of noh drama, specifically how the staging of a set of plays by early playwrights simultaneously codify and undermine spaces of the poetic and social landscapes of the early fifteenth-century.