Professor Laura Moretti

Prof Laura Moretti's research focusses on early modern Japanese popular literature and culture. Prof Moretti's projects are inherently interdisciplinary, placed at the intersection of literature, art history, book history, textual scholarship, and palaeography. Working with both books and visual media, including woodblock prints and board games, and combining rigorous close reading of a wide range of archival materials with bold intellectual arguments, Prof Moretti's research challenges our understanding of literature and wishes to retrieve textual traditions that have been silenced after the encounter of Japanese literature with "modernity". Prof Moretti's research covers a wide span of time, moving from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. 
 

KEY PUBLICATIONS: books

Prof Moretti's first book in English, Recasting the Past: An Early Modern Tales of Ise for Children (Brill, 2016) focusses on how a canonical text of Japanese court literature has been infused with new life in the second half of the eighteenth century when it was remediated as a piece of graphic narrative. Her second book, Pleasure in Profit. Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan (Columbia University Press, 2020) has been named a 2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and was shortlisted for the 2021 DeLong Book History Prize. The first comprehensive study of the birth of Japanese commercial publishing, this monograph recasts books as tools for knowledge making, arguing that popular prose engaged its audience cognitively as well as aesthetically and emotionally to satisfy a burgeoning curiosity about the world. Crucially, it shows that readers experienced entertainment within the didactic, finding pleasure in the profit gained from acquiring knowledge by interacting with transformative literature. Her third book is a volume co-edited with Prof Satō Yukiko (The University of Tokyo): Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan: The World of Kusazōshi (Brill, 2024). This is the first English-language publication of its kind. It enables anyone new to kusazōshi to gain comprehensive knowledge of the field. For the specialist, our edited volume marks a turning point in scholarship, uncovering fresh research avenues. While exploring the powerful effects of the visual-verbal imagination, this collection opens up bold new vistas on the act of reading and advances provocations around comics and manga.
 

KEY PUBLICATIONS: selected articles

"The Ise monogatari in Eighteenth-Century Kibyōshi," 255–302. In  Joshua S. Mostow, Tokurō Yamamoto, and Kurtis Hanlon (eds.), An Ise monogatari Reader (Brill, 2021).

Adaptation as a Strategy for Participation: The Chikusai Storyworld in Early Modern Japanese Literature. Japanese Language and Literature, 54/1 (March 2020): 67-113.
 

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECT

Prof Moretti is currently working a book project titled "Touch Me! Books with Engineered Design from Early Modern Japan." This is the first systematic study of early modern Japanese books known as shikakebon (lit. “books with tricks”). These are books that consist not only of words and images but also of movable components, what I wish to call “books with engineered design.” Aligning, to an extent, with what are known in Western book history as interactive, movable, or novelty books, shikakebon ask readers to manually operate the book beyond the simple turning of pages, inviting a form of embodied reading that is dependent on the combination of physical action and intellectual activity. They entice us to a deeply tactile experience where engagement with the haptic dimension of the printed book fully unlocks its meanings. This type of Japanese book developed from 1809 throughout the long nineteenth-century and across several genres including graphic narratives, comic fiction, and sexually explicit books, with the latter constituting the overwhelming majority. They breathed within a complex media ecology rooted in the entertainment business and encompassing the stage of the kabuki and the puppet theatre, automata (karakuri), peeping machines (nozoki karakuri), and decoupage prints. Eminently under-researched, these books lead to important questions about the history of the book and the act of reading within and without Japan, allowing us to reclaim the importance of the engagement with materials objects in the age of digital images. 

LARGER CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD 

Every year Prof Moretti's runs the Mitsubishi Corporation Summer School in Early-modern Japanese Palaeography. Conceived as a contribution to the field of Japanese studies globally, our summer school trains the new generations in decoding, transcribing, and translating early modern manuscripts and woodblock-printed texts. With us you acquire and hone the complex set of skills required to work with early modern Japanese texts, while working with cutting edge technology that involves AI. The first summer school was held in 2014 and over the course of these years we have trained more than 400 young researchers and we are ready to welcome many more. Our ongoing partnership with Mitsubishi Corporation is growing ever stronger, and we have renamed our summer school in 2023 to acknowledge the wonderful and sustained support: The Mitsubishi Corporation Summer School in Early Modern Japanese Palaeography.

Prof Moretti is also passionate in bridging Japanese-language and English-language academic traditions. The International Symposium of The Association for Early Modern Japanese Literature (Nihon kinsei bungaku kai 日本近世文学会) that she organized in Cambridge in September 2026 is an example of this passion. Nihon kinsei bungaku kai is the largest association dedicated to the study of early modern Japanese literature. This is the first international symposium that the Association organizes in an English-speaking country.