Rate My Professor Roy Starrs

Roy Starrs is an Associate Professor and Honorary Fellow in Japanese and Asian Studies in the Department of Languages and Cultures, Division of Humanities, at the University of Otago. He holds a PhD in Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia, completed between 1980 and 1986, and an MA from the same institution. Before joining Otago, where he has served as Senior Lecturer in the Japanese Programme and Coordinator of Japanese and Asian Studies, he taught at the University of British Columbia and Union College in New York. Starrs specialises in Japanese literature, culture, and intellectual history; comparative literature, and culture. His research interests include Shinto and Buddhism in Japanese literature, comparative study of Buddhist and Christian mysticism, and Expressionism in Japanese and Western modernist art. He is recognised as an expert on Japanese history and politics, Japanese culture, society, religion, literature, art, as well as related topics in European and North American contexts.

Starrs has authored and edited numerous works on Japanese culture and literature. Key publications include his latest monograph, The Paradoxes of Japan's Cultural Identity: Modernity and Tradition in Japanese Literature, Art, Politics and Religion (Amsterdam University Press, 2023); When the Tsunami Came to Shore: Culture and Disaster in Japan (Brill, 2014), addressing cultural responses to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami; Rethinking Japanese Modernism (Brill, 2012); Modernism and Japanese Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Politics and Religion in Modern Japan: Red Sun, White Lotus (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, edited); Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima (University of Hawaii Press, 1994); and Japanese Cultural Nationalism: At Home and in the Asia Pacific (Global Oriental, 2004, edited). Recent articles feature 'In the shadow of a murder: Religious freedom versus the social good in Japan' (Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 2025) and a chapter on D. T. Suzuki's theory of inspiration in Beyond Zen: D. T. Suzuki and the modern transformation of Buddhism (University of Hawai'i Press, 2022). In 2018, he received the Inoue Yasushi Award for Outstanding Research in Japanese Literature, Culture and Art in Australia and New Zealand.