Events > Andrew
L Markus Memorial Lecture
The Markus Lecture is free and open to the public.
Parking is available.
For more information, please contact the Department office.
This lectureship was established in memory of Andrew L. Markus, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Washington from 1986-1995. Established through the generosity of family and friends, this annual lecture honors Professor Markus' contribution to the study of Asian languages and literatures.
The lecture series brings to the University of Washington distinguished scholars in the field of Asian Languages and Literature. The annual lecture is considered the premiere public event sponsored by the department and is the highest honor that the department can bestow on a scholar in the field.
Past Speakers
2008
Paul W. Kroll, University of Colorado at Boulder
Figures for Memory: Personal Moments in Medieval Chinese Poetry
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2007
Monika Boehm-Tettelbach, University of Heidelberg
Heterodox Reasoning in Early Modern North India: To What Consequence?
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2006
Professor Edwin Cranston, Harvard University
The Pleasures of Japanese Poetry
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2005
Professor Pauline Yu, American Council of Learned Societies
Travels of a Culture: Chinese Poetry and the European Imagination
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2004
Professor David McCann, Harvard University
What's 'Lovely' About It? (Korean) Poetry's Appeal and Survival (even in English)
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2003
Professor James L. Fitzgerald, University of Tennessee
With Kindness at Heart, a Song on the Tongue, and Gold and Steel in Hand: Religion, Power, and Ideology in the Mahabharata, the Great Epic of India
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2002
Professor Royall Tyler, Harvard University
Reading (or Not) the Tale of Genji
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2001
Professor Christoph Harbsmeier, University of Oslo
Cognitive Approaches to Chinese Historical Linguistics
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2000
Professor Ronald Stuart McGregor, University of Cambridge
On the Evolution of Hindi as a Language of Literature
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1999
Professor Gari Ledyard, Columbia University
Hong Taeyong and the Korean Rediscovery of China in the Eighteenth Century
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1998
Professor Edwin McClellan, Yale University
A Scene in Natsume Soseki's Last and Uncompleted Novel, Meian
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1996
The Andrew L. Markus Memorial Symposium on Tokugawa Japan
May 10, 1996
Tokugawa Meat and Potatoes and Other Earthy Subjects
Professor Susan B. Hanley, University of Washington
Parody and Satire in Edo Gesaku
Professor Howard Hibbett, Harvard University
Tokugawa Contributions to Qing Scholarship
Professor Laura Hess, St. Olaf College
History and Biography in a Time of Theory: A Review of the Scholarship of Andrew L. Markus
Professor Jeffrey Johnson, University of Utah
Status and State Racism: From Kawata to Eta
Professor Herman Ooms, University of California at Los Angeles
From Medieval to Pre-modern: Representations of the Painter and ‘What's in a Name?'
Professor Melinda Takeuchi, Stanford University |
Andrew L. Markus (1954-1995) was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and educated as a child in both American and European schools. In 1975, pursuing a lifelong interest in Asia from the eastern Meditteranean to the Pacific, he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with a degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations.
After attending Keio University in Tokyo, where he studied with Professor Hinotani Teruhiko, one of Japan's leading scholars of Tokugawa-period (1603-1867) literature, Professor Markus earned his doctorate at Yale University in 1985 with a dissertation on the life and career of the early nineteenth-century novelist Ryutei Tanehiko. In 1986 he left the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Kansas to join the faculty at the University of Washington, where he attained the rank of Associate Professor with tenure in 1992, the same year that a revised version of his doctoral thesis was published under the title The Willow in Autumn.
In a series of widely admired monographs on such diverse topics as celebrity banquets, lending libraries, and public spectacles in Edo (the modern city of Tokyo), Professor Markus enjoyed a reputation as one of the most gifted cultural historians of early modern Japan anywhere in the world. At the time of his death in October, 1995, he was at work on a number of new projects, including a literary biography of Terakado Seiken and a study of the reception of Chinese drama in Tokugawa Japan. Professor Markus's students at the University of Washington have gone on to promising academic careers of their own, and through their work continue the distinguished tradition of scholarship that he upheld in both his teaching and writing.
