Jeffrey Angles

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Jeffrey Angles is an assistant professor at Western Michigan University, where he directs the Japanese language program. He earned his PhD at Ohio State University in Japanese literature with a dissertation entitled Writing the Love of Boys: Representations of Male-Male Desire in the Literature of Murayama Kaita and Edogawa Ranpo (2004). Recently, he has translated a number of modernist short stories for The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, Critical Asian Studies, and Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly, and several more of his translations are forthcoming in Modanizumu: An Anthology of Japanese Modernist Prose (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press).

Other recent projects include co-editing the short story anthology Japan: A Traveler's Literary Companion (Berkeley: Whereabouts Press, 2006), for which he was interviewed on a national broadcast of "All Things Considered" on National Public Radio. He has also recorded the optional voice-over commentary for the Criterion Collection's release of the 1954 classic of Japanese film Sansho the Bailiff.

Dr. Angles’ lifelong interest in Japan and Japanese literature began when he went to Yamaguchi Prefecture in southwestern Japan as a fifteen-year old exchange student.  Since then, he has gone to Japan multiple times, spending several years working and studying in various cities, including Saitama City, Kobe, and Kyoto. 

Currently, his main research interests focus on the representation of same-sex desire in Japanese literature, expressions of ideology in the modernist literature of the 1920s and 1930s, and the development of modern Japanese poetry.  He is also interested in literary translation and the ways that it has spurred literary development both in and outside Japan.