- Name：LURIE, David
- Title：Associate Professor
- Research Field：Premodern Japanese History and Literature
- Biography：
In addition to the history of writing systems and literacy, David Lurie’s research interests include: the literary and cultural history of premodern Japan; the Japanese reception of Chinese literary, historical, and technical writings; the development of Japanese dictionaries and encyclopedias; the history of linguistic thought; Japanese mythology; and world philology. His first book investigated the development of writing systems in Japan through the Heian period. Entitled Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing, it received the Lionel Trilling Award in 2012. Along with Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, he was co-editor of the Cambridge History of Japanese Literature (2015), to which he contributed chapters on myths, histories, gazetteers, and early literature in general. Recent articles include: “Japanese Lexicography from ca. 1800 to the Present,” in The Cambridge World History of Lexicography (2019); “Sekai no moji/riterashī no rekishi to kodai Nihon” [Ancient Japan and the World History of Writing and Literacy], in Kodaishi o hiraku 6: Moji to kotoba (2020), and “The Wind that Melts the Ice: Reflections on the Scale of Philology,” History and Theory 64:4 (2025). He is currently completing a new scholarly monograph, entitled The Emperor’s Dreams: Reading Japanese Mythology.
