About

Andrew Campana is a scholar specializing in modern and contemporary Japanese literature and media. He holds a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University and a Hon. B.A. in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto. His first book, Expanding Verse: Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media, published by the University of California Press in 2024, explores expanded poetic practices in Japan from the 1920s to the present, focusing on how poets engaged with new media technologies such as film, tape recording, television, the internet, and augmented reality. This work was awarded the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies. Currently, he is working on a second book titled Glitch Texts: Digital Poetics in Japan, which examines how poetry has become a site of digital experimentation involving the internet, mobile phones, video games, assistive technologies, and generative text, integrating perspectives from literary studies, media studies, game studies, and disability studies. His research also draws from his involvement with the Trope Tank at MIT, a lab dedicated to understanding computation and literary practice. Campana has performed and published widely in both English and Japanese as a multimedia poet and translator, contributing to the fields of Japanese media, poetry, disability studies, and digital media.

Research topics

• Art
• Literature
• History
• Aesthetics
• Sociology

Selected publications

• Expanding Verse: Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media

  2024-07-03

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Expanding Verse explores experimental poetic practice at key moments of transition in Japan’s media landscape from the 1920s to the present. Andrew Campana centers hybrid poetic forms—many of which have never been examined in detail before—including the cinepoem, the tape recorder poem, the protest performance poem, the music video poem, the online sign language poem, and the augmented reality poem. Drawing together approaches from literary, media, and disability studies, he contends that poetry actively aimed to disrupt the norms of media in each era. For the poets in Expanding Verse, poetry was not a medium in and of itself but a way to push back against what new media technologies crystallized and perpetuated. Their aim was to challenge dominant conceptions of embodiment and sensation, as well as who counts as a poet and what counts as poetry. Over and over, poetic practice became a way to think about each medium otherwise, and to find new possibilities at the edge of media.

  PublisherDOI

• Expanding Verse

  2024-12-02

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more . Expanding Verse explores experimental poetic practice at key moments of transition in Japan's media landscape from the 1920s to the present. Andrew Campana centers hybrid poetic forms in modern and contemporary Japan—many of which have never been examined in detail before—including the cinepoem, the tape recorder poem, the protest performance poem, the music video poem, the online sign language poem, and the augmented reality poem. Drawing together approaches from literary, media, and disability studies, he contends that poetry actively aimed to disrupt the norms of media in each era. For the poets in Expanding Verse , poetry was not a medium in and of itself but a way to push back against what new media technologies crystallized and perpetuated. Their aim was to challenge dominant conceptions of embodiment and sensation, as well as who counts as a poet and what counts as poetry. Over and over, poetic practice became a way to think about each medium otherwise , and to find new possibilities at the edge of media.

  PublisherDOI

• World Webs: Augmented Reality Poetry and Japanese Sign Language Poetry Online

  2024-12-10

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Luminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• You Forbid Me to Walk: Yokota Hiroshi’s Disability Poetics

  2024-12-10

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Luminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Voice Recomposed: A Lost Tape-Recorder Poem of Postwar Japan

  2024-12-10

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Luminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Against the Screen: Poets Rewriting Cinema in 1920s and 1930s Japan

  2024-12-10

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Luminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• As a Piece of Flesh: Feminist Poetic Stardom and the Body

  2024-12-10

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Luminos is University of California Press’ Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Projected on the Dusk: Seeking Cinema in 1910s and 1920s Japanese Poetry

  Literature · 2023-03-07

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this article, I explore a set of poetic works from early 20th-century Japan that took cinema—films, movie theaters, screenings, sets, and a variety of cinematic technologies—as their main subject. An enormous range of poets, including some of modern Japanese poetry’s most canonical figures, took a diverse set of approaches to the subject matter, but all were less interested in portraying films themselves, and more in how poetry could use “cinema” and the “cinematic” to grapple with questions of memory, media, ecology, the body, and social change. Looking at these works—most of which appear here in English for the first time—we can find a new archive of early cinematic thought and sensation not bound to the screen.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• You Forbid Me to Walk: Yokota Hiroshi's Disability Poetics

  positions asia critique · 2022-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article explores the work of the poet Yokota Hiroshi, a leader in Japan's disability rights movement, and how he used his experiences of having cerebral palsy to create a new kind of disability poetics. Like in much of the world, Japan in the 1970s saw the emergence of disability movements that aimed to challenge the inaccessibility and cruelty of a society made by and for nondisabled people. Yokota was involved with two key groups of this kind—the literary coterie Shinonome and the activist group Aoi Shiba no Kai—and over several decades published multiple books about the ideologies that justified killing disabled people and the construction of disabled society and culture, as well as several books of poetry. In his poems, he aimed not only to shed light on the oppression and dehumanization of disabled people but to rethink dominant conceptions of embodiment and “able-bodiedness” itself.

  PublisherDOI

• Japanese Culture through Videogames. By Rachael Hutchinson. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. 294 pp. ISBN: 9780367111380 (cloth).

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2020-11-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

Education

• Ph.D., East Asian Languages and Civilizations

  Harvard University

  2018

Awards & honors

• Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Priz…