Pier Carlo Tommasi

Assistant Professor of Chinese and Japanese
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Pier Carlo Tommasi is Assistant Professor of Japanese at Vassar College. He earned his Ph.D. from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and previously worked at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He joined Vassar’s Department of Chinese and Japanese in the fall of 2024. Dr. Tommasi specializes in medieval literature, with an emphasis on warrior culture and its local reconfigurations. More broadly, his research explores how writing practices shaped the concept and experience of selfhood in premodern Japanese society.

BA, MA, PhD, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia
At Vassar since 2024

Contact

Eleanor Butler Sanders Hall
Box 288

Research and Academic Interests

  • Japanese literature
  • Auto/biography
  • Book history
  • Medievalism & Samurai culture
  • Classical language (bungo) pedagogy

Courses

  • JAPA 205: Intermediate Japanese
  • JAPA 305: Advanced Japanese
  • JAPA 306: Tradition and Creativity in Japanese Culture (Spring 2025)

Selected Publications

“Neither Plagiarism nor Patchwork: The Culture of Citation and the Making of Authorship in Medieval Japanese Poetry.” Monumenta Nipponica, 77:2 (2022), pp. 207–58. DOI: 10.1353/mni.2022.0047

“The Bunbu Paradigm Reconsidered: Warrior Literacy and Symbolic Violence in Late Medieval Japan.” In Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies 19 (2020), pp. 89–113. DOI: 10.26812/pajls.v19i.1552

“Lo specchio del guerriero: Forme di autorappresentazione e riflessi letterari nel Minokagami di Tamaki Yoshiyasu” (The Warrior’s Mirror: Forms of Self-Representation and Literary Reflections in Tamaki Yoshiyasu’s Minokagami). In Orizzonti giapponesi: ricerche, idee, prospettive, eds. Matteo Cestari, Gianluca Coci, Daniela Moro, and Anna Specchio, pp. 305–327. Rome: Aracne, 2018. DOI: 10.4399/978882552118415

Grants, Fellowships, Honors, Awards

2024. OVPRS Faculty Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research & Creative Work, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

2023. Japan Studies Endowment Special Project Award, UHM Center for Japanese Studies.

The Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Fellowship for Doctoral Candidates, 2018–2019.