Dr. Donald Keene

Dr. Keene was born in New York, and graduated from Columbia College (as it was) in 1942 with honours in Comparative literature. He then entered a U.S. Navy Japanese language school, and from 1943-46 he served with the U.S. Navy as a translator and interpreter of Japanese. He followed this up with two years of graduate study at Columbia and Harvard Universities, and then had five years of residence at Cambridge University, where he served as Assistant Lecturer and later Lecturer in Japanese and Korean from 1948-53, and received his M.A. Meanwhile, in 1949 he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He spent two years as a Fellow at Kyoto University from 1953-55, and from that time until his retirement in 1992 he was professor of Japanese at Columbia University. In 1978 he received his Litt. D. from Cambridge University, and since then he has received honorary Litt. Ds. from a number of universities, including his own in 1997. He has been awarded many prizes, beginning with the Kikuchi Kan Prize in 1962, when he was the only foreigner to have been so honoured. In 1975 he was decorated with the Order of the Rising Sun, Third Class, and in 1993 with the next higher class of the same order.

He has published about 25 books in English consisting of studies of Japanese literature and culture, and about 30 books in Japanese, some written originally in Japanese and some translated from English. The fourth and concluding volume of his history of Japanese literature was published in August 1993 under the title Seeds in the Heart. A study of Ashikaga Yoshimasa and his age has been appearing serially in Japanese, and will be published in book form next January, and probably later in English.

Lectures available: 2002-10