Adam Manfredi is a PhD candidate in Japanese and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches courses on Japanese language, literature, and popular culture.
He has an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University, a BA in interdisciplinary studies from the University of California Berkeley, and was a Japanese Ministry of Education Scholar at the University of Tokyo. His research focuses on narrative theory, popular culture, protest narratives, and contemporary Japanese literature. Particularly, he is interested in how popular narratives shape and are shaped by collective imaginings of post-war Japanese history.
His project, Narrative and Meaning Making: Stories of Japan’s 1968, examines literature from the 1960s Japanese New Left protest movement. He argues that writers who participated in campus protests went on to use fiction to investigate, challenge, or overturn the dominant narrative of the movement as a failure. In support of this project, Adam conducted research at Keio University on a Fulbright Scholarship and has received funding from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Japan Collection. His article, “The Poetics of Space in Enchi Fumiko’s The Waiting Years,” is forthcoming in the US-Japan Women’s Journal.
He is also actively involved in expanding higher education to incarcerated individuals and has taught and tutored at Missouri men’s and women’s correctional facilities through the Washington University Prison Education Project. Outside of research and teaching, Adam enjoys creative writing and practicing martial arts and has a second-degree black belt in judo.