“I find Japan and the Japanese language endlessly wonderful and fascinating, and I am thrilled when students catch my enthusiasm. But the real goal in my classes is to get students beyond the stage of wonder and fascination, to the point where they are using their encounter with things Japanese to think critically about how language and culture shape their perceptions of their world. “ - Mark Silver

Mark H. Silver
Assistant Professor of Japanese

• Modern Japanese language and literature

• Late 19th- and early 20th-century popular literature and culture
• Inter-cultural literary borrowing
• Translation and translation studies
• Crime writing and reportage
• Japanese documentary photography
• Constructions of Japan's wartime past

After earning a B.A. in English (magna cum laude) from Haverford College, Mark Silver took a Ph.D in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University, where he specialized in modern Japanese.

His doctoral dissertation focused on Japanese crime literature — and particularly upon the borrowed genre of detective fiction — as a touchstone for understanding the cultural transfers taking place between Japan and the West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

His current research focuses on the retrospective construction of Japan's wartime past in literature, photography, and film produced between 1945 and 1955.

He has held fellowships from Yale University and the Japan Foundation, and has had teaching experience at Yale and at Colgate University. Fluent in Japanese, he spent five and a half years living and working in Japan, including one year as a visiting researcher at Keio University in Tokyo.

At Connecticut College, he teaches the introductory class to the East Asian Studies major, classes on Japanese literature and film, and upper-level Japanese language courses.

His book, Purloined Letters: Cultural Borrowing and Japanese Popular Crime Literature, 1868-1937, has been released by the University of Hawaii Press (2008).

Professor Silver has published articles in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (“The Lies and Connivances of an Evil Woman: Early Meiji Realism and the Tale of Takahashi Oden the She-Devil,” June 2003) and the Journal of Popular Culture (“Putting the Court on Trial: Cultural Borrowing and the Translated Detective Novel in Nineteenth-Century Japan,” Spring 2003), as well as entries on Japanese crime literature in the Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing.

View the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures Web site.