Royce Hall, rm 243
Calligraphy fragments in Edo-period
kohitsu tekagami (old calligraphy albums) are organized by their attributed calligrapher, each assigned to an implicit category discernible only through association with proximate fragments. Baked into this mode of anthologizing is a method of historical storytelling that can simultaneously reinforce standard narratives and radically break them. In the first half of this talk, I perform a close reading of the placement of women calligraphers in one
tekagami album, showing how their minority status in the album turns into a catalyst for reconsidering the structure of historical memory. In the second half of the talk, I introduce a new structure of historical memory in the making right now: a database of cross-institutional
tekagami to be hosted on Japan Past and Present. While the database promises to intervene in the process of manuscript fragmentation that began in the early modern period and continues today, allowing researchers to reconstruct dismembered literary, religious, and historical works, I argue it also continues and expands the legacy of organizational experimentation built into the
tekagami from the start, guiding this premodern information technology into the future.
Mary Gilstad is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies (2025-2027). She received her PhD in Japanese Literature from Yale University in 2025. Her research spans classical and early modern Japanese literature, art history, and media/information studies, focusing on the theory and history of anthologization across media formats including waka collections and calligraphy albums (tekagami).
Sponsor(s): Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies
