Dr. Jonathan Glade

Jonathan Glade received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (Department of East Asian  Languages and Civilizations), where he specialized in modern Japanese and Korean  Literature. His dissertation—titled “Occupied Liberation: Transforming Literary Boundaries in Japan and Southern Korea, 1945–1952”—places Japanese and  (southern) Korean literary works within a framework of overlap and intersection as a  means of calling into question the dominant, nation-based understandings of Korean and Japanese literary history and dealing with the fluidity of literary production under  US Military Occupation.

While at UCLA, Dr. Glade conducted research on his book manuscript, tentatively titled "From Imperial to National: Transformations in Japanese and Korean Literature, 1935–1952." This book project centered on the claim that Japanese and Korean literature, during the transition from empire to postwar occupation, transformed from broad categories based on imperial hierarchies and structures into constrictive categories marked by struggles to come to terms with the imperial/colonial past. Though the project draws from historical methodologies, literary texts served as the central focus since literature was a particularly active space of contestation and negotiation during the transformative transwar years. This analysis was informed by the lens of censorship, which so profoundly shaped literary production in both Imperial Japan and US-occupied Japan and southern Korea.

Dr. Glade focused extensively on the censorship records found in the George W. Prange Collection of postwar Japanese publications, gave a colloquium on “Fraternization: Delineating Boundaries of Expression in US-Occupied Japan” and taught a course about “Japan and the Two Koreas,” which examined the cultural borders and intersections between Japan, South Korea, and North Korea.