Faculty Bios

William R. LaFleur

Professor of Japanese Studies

William R. LaFleur is the E. Dale Saunders Professor in Japanese Studies in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a Professor in the Department of Religious Studies. He did graduate work in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan and received the Ph.D. in the History of Religions at the University of Chicago. He has taught at Princeton, UCLA, and Sophia University in Tokyo. In 1989 he was the first non-Japanese recipient of the Watsuji Tetsurô Culture Prize for scholarship. His books include Mirror for the Moon: Poetry by Saigyô 1118-1190 (1978); The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literature Arts in Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 1986), Buddhism: A Cultural Perspective (Prentice-Hall, 1988); L iquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan (Princeton University Press, 1992). He edited Zen and Western Thought: Essays by Masao Abe (1985), recipient of a prize from the American Acaemy of Religion, and Dôgen Studies 1985), both books published by the University of Hawaii Press. A new study, Awesome Nightfall: The Life, Death, and Poetry of Saigyô will be published in 2003. He is currently completing work on a volume that studies Japanese critics of American biotechnology and bioethics. He is organizing an international conference to examine differences in biothetics in Japan, America, and Germany. Occasionally he publishes his own poetry.

William R. LaFleur
847 Williams Hall
Dept. of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia PA 19104-6305

Tel: 215-898-7466
Fax: 610-527-5315
E-mail: lafleur@sas.upenn.edu