Professor Laura Moretti

Laura joined Emmanuel in 2012 as an Official Fellow and Director of Studies in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. She is a University Teaching Officer in the AMES Department at the University, as Professor of Early Modern Japanese Literature and Culture.

Biography

Brought up in Northern Italy, and with an ever–growing passion for languages and literature, the choice of Japanese Studies came naturally. Laura developed her love for early modern Japanese literature during her undergraduate course at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia. The core of her training took place in Japan, where she studied for two years at the University of Tokyo as a research student. She was awarded her PhD at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia in 2003. After teaching for nine years at her alma mater, she moved to the UK in 2010 and taught for two years at the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University, before joining the College and University of Cambridge.

Teaching

At undergraduate level, Laura teaches Japanese language (both modern and premodern) and Japanese literature across all years. She welcomes postgraduate students interested in Japanese premodern and early modern literature, encouraging interdisciplinary projects on visual culture and book history. Laura loves teaching and has been fortunate enough to have received several teaching prizes, including the Pilkington Prize, in recognition of contribution to excellence in teaching at Cambridge. She also received the CUSU student–led teaching award in the category of Undergraduate Supervisor (2019).

Research

Laura works on Japanese visual culture and literature from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her latest project focused on graphic narratives, and currently she looks at the intersection between games and literature.

Her research focuses on early modern Japanese popular literature and culture. Her projects are inherently interdisciplinary, placed at the intersection of literature, art history, book history, textual scholarship and palaeography. Laura'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'. She works with both books and visual media, including woodblock prints and board games, and combines rigorous close reading of a wide range of archival materials with bold intellectual arguments. Her research covers a wide span of time, moving from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century.