Teacher Profiles
SUGIYAMA, Kazutaka Associate Professor
| Subjects Taught | American poetry, American literary history I & II, English and American literature readings II |
Research topic
My research focuses primarily on contemporary English and American literature, drawing on posthumanism and ecocriticism. Recently, I've been exploring the concept of "ghosts" as the other, existing both within and outside the contemporary individual, through the representations of the relationship between humans and non-human beings in the recent works of American author Richard Powers. In this process, I'm attempting a re-evaluation of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida's "possession theory" within the context of ecocriticism.
performance
- Main academic papers
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- “The Otherness of Communication: Systems Theory and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go”College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, vol. 51 no.1 (Winter), 2024, pp. 106-129.
- “The Survival of Specters: Hauntology and Richard Powers's The Overstory”Studies in the Novel, vol. 55 no. 2 (Summer), 2023, pp. 210-232.
- “The Aesthetic of Waste: Don DeLillo's Mao II”The Journal of the American Literature Society of Japan, vol. 18, 2020, pp. 75-92.
- External funding
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- Fukuhara Memorial Fund for Research in English and American Literature, Research Grant (Fukuhara Prize), February 2026