Will Bridges

PhD

Will Bridges.

Will Bridges

PhD

Will Bridges

PhD

About

Will Bridges is the Arthur Satz Professor of the Humanities, Associate Professor of Japanese, and Core Faculty member of the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies at the University of Rochester. His research and teaching—which has been recognized by the Fulbright Program, the Japan Foundation, the Association for Asian Studies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities—is underpinned by a fairly straightforward question: what is the relationship between storytelling and identity, or: in what way is fiction an object of the humanities—one that tells us who we were, who we are, and who we might become?

His first monograph is Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature (University of Michigan Press, 2020). He is the founding editor of the Journal of Social and Cultural Possibilities, which encourages scholarly explorations of the possible. He is currently working on two monographs. The first is The Ethics of Reparations in Six Deaths. Six Deaths considers the ethics of repair and reparations in cases ranging from the Tulsa massacre to the internment of Japanese Americans. The second project is The Black Pacific: A Poetic History. The Black Pacific considers the development of modern Japanese literature not as the body of fiction produced by an island nation, but as a body of fiction developed on a central port in a transpacific dialogue on racial existence. His scholarship is informed by his creative writing. His creative nonfiction, which has been named a Notable Essay of 2020 by the Best American Essays series and nominated for a Pushcart Prize, tries to articulate the pleasures and pains of black life.