Jana Urbanovaさん
Associate Professor at Hosei University
I applied for the HIF fellowship during the final year of my doctoral studies at Hosei University, since I believed that it would be a good opportunity to deepen my research after I had completed my PhD thesis. The fellowship provided me with a wonderful opportunity to further dive into the mysteries of poetic expressions of Japanese and Okinawan poetry in the truly accomplished and challenging, and at the same time friendly and welcoming academic environment that Hosei University represents.
The intensive year of research enabled me to summarize my findings in a comprehensive study published as a series of three articles written in Japanese in The Okinawa Bunka – the Journal of Okinawan Studies. In addition, I was able to complete a book on comparative research of Okinawan and Japanese poetic expressions which was published in 2015 in Japanese. In 2017, I received the Nakahara Zenchū Prize of the Japanese Society for Okinawan Studies for Research in Literature. The rewarding experience of conducting research at Hosei University, which contributed to the recognition from the Japanese Society for Okinawan Studies, encouraged me to continue doing research and pursue an academic career at the university.
I am currently teaching at Hosei University, where I focus on two main teaching areas – Japanese literature and English as a foreign language. Furthermore, together with my former academic supervisor at Hosei University and another scholar, we are engaged in a joint research project on Ryūkūan literature conducted with the help of the Grant-in-aid for Scientific Research (Kakenhi) in which my research concentrates on Okinawan lyric poetry ryūka.
