Regional: East Asia; Modern Europe; Transpacific North America
Thematic: Critical Theory and Intellectual History; Nationalism and Colonialism; Race and
Ethnicity; Translation; Inscription and Visuality
Education: BA in philosophy from the University of Tokyo, 1971; MA in Far Eastern Languages and
Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 1980; Ph.D. in Far Eastern Languages and
Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 1983.
Naoki Sakai teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies and is a member
of the graduate field of History at Cornell University. He has published in a number of languages in
the fields of comparative literature, intellectual history, translation studies, the studies of
racism and nationalism, and the histories of semiotic and literary multitude - speech, writing,
corporeal expressions, calligraphic regimes, and phonographic traditions. He has led the project of
TRACES, a multilingual series in four languages - Korean, Chinese, English, and Japanese (German,
Italian, and Spanish will be added in 2008) - whose editorial office is located at Cornell, and
served as its founding senior editor (1996 - 2004). In addition to TRACES, Naoki Sakai serves as a
member of the following editorial boards, positions east asia cultural critique (in the
United States), Post-colonial studies (in Australia), Tamkang Review (in Taiwan),
International Dictionary of Intellectual History (Britain and Germany), Modern Japanese
Cultural History (Japan), ASPECTS (South Korea) and Multitudes (in France).
Translation and Subjectivity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 (in
English, Japanese & Korean).
Voices of the Past, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991 (in English & Japanese,
Korean forthcoming)
Stillbirth of the Japanese as an ethnos and as a language, Tokyo: Shinyo-sha, 1996 (Japanese
& Korean)
Pride and Prejudice, Seoul: Humanist, 2002 (with Lim Jiehyun in Korean, with the
Japanese version forthcoming)
Destruction of the World History, Tokyo: Ibunsha, 1998 (in Japanese with Nishitani
Osamu, Korean translation forthcoming)
Japan, Image, the United States - Community of Sympathy and Imperial Nationalisms, Tokyo:
Seido-sha, 2007 (Japanese and Korean)
Hope and Constitution, Tokyo: Ibunsha, 2008 (Japanese and Korean forthcoming)
Deconstructing Nationality, Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Monograph Series, 2005 (co-edited
with Brett de Bary and Toshio Iyotani)
TRACES 1 'Specter of the West' 2000 (co-edited with Yukiko Hanawa in Japanese, English,
Korean and Chinese)
TRACES 4 'Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference' 2006 (co-edited with Jon Solomon
in English; Chinese, Korean, and Japanese version forthcoming)
Courses:
Theorizing Race and Gender in East Asian Literatures and Histories (COML 3980/COML 6680/ASIAN 3388/ASIAN 6688/FGSS 3850)
The Formation of the Field - Japan as an Area (ASIAN 4428)
Translation and Cultural Difference (COML 4700/ASIAN 4481)
Contemporary East Asian Studies (ASIAN 6629)
Intellectual History of Empires (HIST 6810/ASIAN 6681)
Modern Japanese Philosophy I & II (JPLIT 6617 and JPLIT 6618)
Related links: TRACES: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory and Translation
