Biography

Email: hirota.atsuhiko.5e[at]kyoto-u.ac.jp

Atsuhiko Hirota is an Associate Professor of English at Kyoto University, Japan. He is currently working on the representations of Circe-like characters in Shakespeare’s plays, with a focus on their relationship with early modern discourses of the vulnerability of English identity.

His research on Shakespeare’s mythology includes:

• “Venetian Jasons, parti-coloured lambs and a tainted wether: Ovine tropes and the Golden Fleece in The Merchant of Venice”. In Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (ed. Janice Valls-Russell, Agnès Lafont and Charlotte Coffin). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017: 109-27.

•  “Circes in Ephesus: Civic Affiliations in The Comedy of Errors and Early Modern English Identity”. The Shakespearean International Yearbook 10 (2017): 231-55.

•  “The Memory of Hesione: Intertextuality and Social Amnesia in Troilus and Cressida”. Shakespeare et la mémoire, Actes des Congrès de la Societé Française Shakespeare 30 (2013): 43-56. (web version here)

•  “Myths and Liminal Spaces: the Marches in 1 Henry IV” (paper at the 1st Kyoto-Bristol Symposium “Myths, Geographies, and Forms: Place and Person in Early-Modern English Literature” [the University of Bristol, 11 January 2013]).

•  “The Golden Fleece and the Parti-Coloured Lambs: The Ovine Trope in The Merchant of Venice” (seminar paper at the Shakespeare Society of Japan Seminar “Shylock in Disguise” [Kyoto, 27 October 2011]).

He was co-leader (with Dennis Kennedy) of the seminar “Shakespeare, Myth, and Asia” at the 2013 ESRA Shakespeare Conference.

Atsuhiko HIROTA