Fellowship Taking Professor to Japan for Research
Assistant Professor Gosia Citko-DuPlantis will take a leave from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in early 2026 to delve further into her research on Japanese culture.
The Japan Foundation has awarded Citko-DuPlantis, who teaches in the UT Department of World Languages and Cultures, a Japanese Studies Fellowship, one of the most competitive and prestigious fellowships in the field globally. The fellowships support research projects in humanities and social sciences.
In summer 2025 Citko-DuPlantis is sending her first book to press, about the reception history of “Man’yoshū” (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, 759–785), the earliest collection of classical Japanese court poetry that still exists, in the medieval and modern eras.
While in Japan she is interested in exploring how premodern culture and literature is represented in public spaces, and how the country is promoting Japanese heritage to the world. She also plans to delve into digital gaming.
“I want to have a closer look at popular media in Japan, how they’re portraying premodern Japan, how they’re promoting Japan’s image, and look at how it’s received, who’s interacting with it, who plays those video games that have elements of premodern cultural literature,” she said. “I think interacting on a regular basis with scholars and graduate students in Japan, and also with the digital games industry in Japan—which is the oldest in the world—is also important.”
While in Tokyo, she will be affiliated with the private Aoyama Gakuin University.
Gosia Citko-DuPlantis received her first fellowship from the Japan Foundation as a doctoral student and has often visited the country, but she hasn’t spent an extended period of time in Japan for more than a decade.
At UT, she teaches courses on premodern Japanese culture, classical Japanese language, readings in modern Japanese, and Japanese popular media. Growing up in a small town in Poland, she first became interested in translations of Japanese literature as a teenager. She began studying the Japanese language at the University of Warsaw. Now she writes and publishes in Polish, English, and Japanese.
For Citko-DuPlantis the desire to pursue knowledge and her interest in poetry led to her career as an academic with expertise in premodern Japanese poetry. She’s particularly drawn to medieval poetry by its intertextuality.
“There’s a whole discursive universe behind one poem,” she said. “It can take a while to discover the connections that stand behind it, but I like that kind of research.”
By Amy Beth Miller