Grace Ting ’06 is currently a PhD candidate at Yale University researching gender and sexuality in contemporary Japanese literature
Why did you decide to become a Japanese major? How did it shape your experience at Wellesley?
Originally, I planned on being an English major and was also taking many music courses. But I was definitely committed to taking Japanese language throughout my time at Wellesley, and I met a few of my best friends (to this day) while bonding through language classes. I also enjoyed the Japanese literature, literary translation, and film classes that I took. Although a literary theory class in the English department also inspired me to apply to Ph.D. programs, I was much more interested in working on East Asian literatures, not British or American. The Japanese studies classes and my honors thesis on the writer Yamada Eimi helped me start planning what I really wanted to do after graduation.
What are you doing now?
I’m a Ph.D. student in the Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures at Yale. At the moment (2014-2015), I’m writing a dissertation on gender & sexuality in contemporary Japanese literature while affiliated with Waseda University in Tokyo. In the future, I hope to teach literature at a liberal arts college or university in the U.S. or East Asia. I’m also interested in producing English-language translations of recent Japanese literature.
How has it influenced your life after Wellesley?
Being a Japanese major at Wellesley has clearly been an enormous advantage for me since the coursework directly provided knowledge and skills necessary for my research on Japanese literature. More specifically, it gave me a strong foundation that helped me get accepted into a Ph.D. program at Yale (and elsewhere), thanks to my solid language, research, and writing experience. Even now, I keep in close touch with Professor Eve Zimmerman, my former advisor, and look to her for friendship & support in a field that is still largely male-dominated. Finally, since graduating, I have spent over three years (on & off) studying, working, and conducting research in Japan–my time as a Japanese major was the beginning of a lifelong relationship with Japan.