Professor Paul Schalow was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1952. His interest in East Asia began while living in Taiwan as a boy and developed further after he spent a year in Kyushu, Japan, as a Rotary International high school exchange student. His SAS Signature Course, Global East Asia, applies theories of globalization and localization to the region based on a lifetime of experience there. His current research project is taking him back to the classical period, however; it addresses male interiority and self-representation in a Heian courtier’s diary written in Sino-Japanese.

• Ph.D. in Japanese Literature, Harvard University, Department of East Asian Languages and
  Civilizations, 1985
• M.A. in Regional Studies-East Asia, Harvard University, Department of East Asian Languages
  and Civilizations, 1979
• B.A. in Japanese and Linguistics, Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1977

• Classical and Early-modern Japanese Literature
• Japanese Women’s Writing
• Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb

• “Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Economies of Victimization, Communities of Empathy.” In Judit Árokay, Verena Blechinger-Talcott, and Hilaria Gössmann, eds. Essays in Honor of Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, (Munich: Iudicium, 2008) pp. 409-426.
• “Figures of Worship: Responses to Onnagata on the Kabuki Stage in Seventeenth-Century Japanese Vernacular Prose.” In Minoru Fujita and Michael Shapiro, eds. Transvestism and the Onnagata Traditions in Shakespeare and Kabuki. (Kent: Global Oriental, 2006) pp. 59-70.
• “Five Portraits of Male Friendship in the Ise Monogatari.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 60:2 (2000) pp. 445-488.
• “Theorizing Sex/Gender in Early Modern Japan: Kitamura Kigin’s Maidenflowers and Wild Azaleas.” Japanese Studies 18:3 (1998) pp. 247-263.
• "The Invention of a Literary Tradition of Male Love: Kitamura Kigin’s Iwatsutsuji.” Monumenta Nipponica 48:1 (1993) pp. 1-31.
• "Spiritual Dimensions of Male Beauty in Japanese Buddhism.” In Michael L. Stemmeler & José Ignacio Cabezón, eds. Religion, Homosexuality, and Literature. (Las Colinas, Texas: Monument Press, 1992) pp. 75-94. Reprinted in Winston Leyland, ed. Queer Dharma: Voices of Gay Buddhists. (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1998) pp. 107-124.
• "Male Love in Early Modern Japan: A Literary Depiction of the ‘Youth’.” In Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, & George Chauncey, eds. Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. (New York: New American Library, 1989) pp. 118-128.

• Global East Asia (01:098:245) cross-listed with (01:214:245)
• Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (01:565:315)
• The Samurai Tradition in Japanese Literature and Film (01:565:320)

• Awarded the 1990 Japan U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, for Ihara Saikaku’s The Great Mirror of Male Love (Stanford University Press, 1990).
• Nominated for the 2007 Warren-Brooks Prize for Outstanding Literary Criticism, for A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2007).

• Member of Comparative Literature Core Faculty 
• Member of Women's and Gender Studies Affiliate Faculty
• Faculty Mentor for SAS Honors Program 
• Member of Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature