Matsuzaki Hiroko

Hiroko Matsuzaki is a PhD candidate in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Tokyo. Her doctoral dissertation is on Taiwanese literature, focusing on the works of post-World War II Taiwanese writers such as Tzeng Ching-Wen. She is interested mainly in the multi-faceted cultural and linguistic identities of writers like Tzeng who grew up during both the Japanese Occupation (1895-1945) and subsequent KMT rule in the post-war period. In 2007, Hiroko was a research scholar at National Taiwan University after receiving a fellowship from the Interchange Association. While there she investigated how post-war Taiwanese Literature was integrated into high school Chinese textbooks in Taiwan. Now, as a visiting fellow at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Hiroko will continue doing research for her dissertation by examining how Tzeng's readings of Western literature with a Japanese lens affected, and in many ways shaped, his own writing.