Dr. Royall Tyler

We are holding an extra meeting before the summer recess in order to  take advantage of a brief visit to Tokyo by Dr. Royall Tyler, whose thought-provoking new translation of The Tale of Genji  was published two years ago. Dr. Tyler, whose home is in New South Wales, Australia, received his B.A. in Far Eastern Languages from Harvard University in 1957. He then proceeded to Columbia University,  where he was a star pupil of Dr. Donald Keene (who will be attending the meeting and will give the vote of thanks); there he received his M.A. in Japanese History in 1966, and his Ph.D. in Japanese Literature in 1977. While at Columbia he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Toronto and Ohio State University, and since 1977 he has held a number of positions: from 1977-84 he was Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature at Ohio State University and then at the University of Wisconsin at Madison; from 1984 to June 1990 he was Senior Lecturer in the East Asian Institute of the University of Oslo; from July 1990 to December 1991 he was Senior Lecturer at the Japan Centre, Australian National University, and from 1992-2000 he was Reader (equivalent to Professor) at the same institution, after which he was a visiting fellow for two more years. For the last three months he has been a visiting professor at Stanford University.  Over the years he has also spent time as a visiting professor in Tokyo and Kyoto.

 Of his various publications, there is space to mention only a few of his books. He contributed to, and assisted Donald Keene in editing, Twenty Plays of the Nô Theatre (to which Eileen Kato also contributed), and published A Cycle of Nô Plays and A Second Cycle of Nô Plays as Cornell East Asia Papers Nos. 17 & 18 (1978). Another collection is Japanese Nô Dramas (Penguin Classics, 1992). For his work on The Tale of Genji (New York, Viking, 2001), he received two grants from the Australian Research Council, and last year he was awarded the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission Translation Prize.