Rate My Professor Charlotte Eubanks

Charlotte Eubanks is Professor of Comparative Literature, Japanese, and Asian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. She currently serves as Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Comparative Literature (2025-2026) and was Department Head from 2020 to 2024. Her academic journey includes a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado in 2005, an MA from Indiana University in 1999, and a BA from the University of Georgia in 1993. Eubanks joined Penn State as an Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013, and to full Professor in 2021.

Eubanks' research centers on material culture, performance studies, and book history, with a particular emphasis on Japanese and Buddhist literature spanning the medieval period to the present. She explores transnational Buddhism as a literary force, techniques for cultivating the mind through religious texts, and transformations in visual culture tied to colonization and war. Her work also examines how art and museums serve as sites for ethical engagement. She has published two monographs: Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 2011) and The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021). Her articles appear in prestigious journals such as PMLA, The Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Asian Folklore Studies, Book History, The Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, postmedieval, and Word & Image. Eubanks holds editorial positions as Associate Editor of Verge: Studies in Global Asias and incoming Coeditor-in-Chief of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies. Among her honors are the Penn State University Teaching Fellow award in 2018, which included funding for pedagogical innovations, and the 2025 Rosemary Schraer Mentoring Award. Her scholarship influences discussions in global Asias, premodern theory, sound studies, and visual culture, bridging Japanese studies with broader comparative literature frameworks. She teaches courses on global Japanese literature, world literature, graphic novels, and Japanese visual culture at both graduate and undergraduate levels.