Hamilton Lugar School
of Global and International Studies

Phone:

(812) 855-4031

Email:

esarra@indiana.edu

Department:

East Asian Languages and Cultures

Campus:

IU Bloomington

Sarra researches classical Japanese fiction and memoir, gender in premodern Japanese culture, and eco-criticism and the literature of place. Her first book, on Heian women’s self-writings, “Fictions of Femininity: Literary Inventions of Gender in Japanese Court Women’s Memoirs” (Stanford University Press, 1999), was a winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Book award for 2000. Her current book project, “Unreal Houses: Character, Gender, and Genealogy in The Tale of Genji,” analyzes the literary figure of the “house”—in both its architectural and genealogical senses—as a matrix for the Genji narrative’s creative re-envisioning of the problems of polygynous marriage and its fictional representations.