{"id":107076,"date":"2023-03-31T09:40:06","date_gmt":"2023-03-31T00:40:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/weekly\/?p=107076"},"modified":"2024-05-31T16:31:02","modified_gmt":"2024-05-31T07:31:02","slug":"94880-2-2-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/weekly\/news-en\/2023\/03\/31\/107076\/","title":{"rendered":"Traveling back in time to the United States through reading and enjoying Japan by touring on my motorcycle."},"content":{"rendered":"
Manuel Azuaje-Alamo, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences<\/h6>\n
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Having grown up bilingual in English and Spanish in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and the United States, Manuel Azuaje-Alamo graduated from the University of Alberta in Canada. He holds a Master\u2019s degree from the University of Tokyo and another from Harvard University, where he is also a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature. After obtaining his first doctoral degree from the University of Tokyo he worked as an adjunct lecturer at Toyo University and Sophia University, amongst other institutions, and now holds a position as Associate Professor at Waseda University. He has studied abroad in Brazil, Korea, China, and Taiwan, and specializes in world literature, comparative literature, and translation theory.<\/p><\/div>\n

As you can imagine from the fact that my specialty is world literature and comparative literature, I was what you would call a \u201cbookworm\u201d from early age. Ever since I can remember, I have loved printed text, particularly novels that depict landscapes from another world or foreign countries. That \u201clove of travel\u201d is still alive and well.<\/p>\n

Most of the literary works that I teach at university and that I deal with in my research are fiction, but I also love reading non-fiction, especially history books. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, reading biographies of past US presidents has become somewhat of a hobby of mine. As the English saying goes, \u201cThe past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,\u201d and it is really interesting and fun to read about the way in which American culture and people\u2019s lifestyles have changed at a micro level since the times of the first president, Washington. The biographies of the presidents of the United States are all over 800 pages long, so I finally finished reading that of the tenth president this spring. There is still a long way to go to get to 19th-century Lincoln, let alone Kennedy in the 20th century, but I plan to enjoy this reading journey as a manner of time travel.<\/p>\n

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