Rate My Professor Matthieu Felt

Matthieu Felt is Associate Professor of Japanese in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Florida. He specializes in premodern Japanese literature, history, and religion. Felt earned his Ph.D. in Japanese literature with distinction from Columbia University in 2017, with a dissertation titled “Rewriting the Past: Textual Structure and Commentarial Legerdemain in Japan’s First Official History.” He holds an M.Phil. and M.A. in Japanese literature from Columbia University and a B.A. with honors in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. Before joining the University of Florida as Assistant Professor in 2018, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies from 2017 to 2018, and served as Junior Researcher at Waseda University and Visiting Researcher at the University of Tokyo.

Felt’s research centers on mythology and myth reception, historiography, narratology, intellectual history, literary and religious canonization, commentarial practice, vernacularization, national and origin myths, borders and frontiers, and translation. His major monograph, Meanings of Antiquity: Myth Interpretation in Premodern Japan, was published by the Harvard University Asia Center in 2023. Key publications include “Nihongi Banquet Poetry: Rewriting Japanese Myth in Verse” in Monumenta Nipponica (2021), the translation and introduction of “Tale of the Dirt Spider” in Monsters, Animals, and Other Worlds: A Collection of Short Medieval Japanese Tales (Columbia University Press, 2018), and “Shiratori Kurakichi to Tsuda Sōkichi no shinwa ninshiki” (2018). He is currently translating the two-volume Chronicles of Japan (Nihon shoki) for Oxford University Press, supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Individual Fellowship in 2022. Among his awards are the Japan Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship (2013–2014), multiple Lord Ito Shinjo Fellowships from Columbia University, and the Asada Eiji B.A. Thesis Prize from the University of Chicago. Felt teaches courses such as Japanese Frontiers, Monsters and Horror in Japan, Samurai War Tales, and Introduction to Japanese Culture, and has served on the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Finance Committee.