About

Brian Hurley is an Associate Professor in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. His academic focus includes Japanese Literature, Close Reading, Intellectual History, and Economics. As a faculty member, he contributes to the understanding and analysis of Japanese literary works and their historical and intellectual contexts, integrating approaches from literary analysis and economic thought. His work supports the academic mission of the college by fostering a deeper comprehension of Japanese cultural and intellectual history.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Aesthetics
• Law
• History
• Philosophy
• Literature
• Art
• Psychology
• Art history
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• Edward Seidensticker and the Conservative Style in Japanese Literary Studies

  Journal of Japanese Studies · 2025-01-01

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  This article explores aspects of postwar conservative thought through an unlikely but revealing case study: the writings of the American scholar and translator of Japanese literature Edward Seidensticker (1921–2007). Guided by a corpus of archival documents held in the Edward G. Seidensticker Papers at the University of Colorado-Boulder, the analysis puts Seidensticker’s perspective on postwar Japanese society into dialogue with his writings on what he called the “conservatism” of modern Japanese literature. This approach illuminates some of the key dynamics of postwar conservatism that have remained undertheorized in Japan studies scholarship.

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• Reading Hiroshima in the Age of Vietnam: John Hersey at the White House Festival of the Arts

  Japan focus · 2024-03-01 · 1 citations

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  Abstract At the White House Festival of the Arts in 1965, the American novelist John Hersey read excerpts from his noted non-fiction work Hiroshima (1946) as an act of protest against President Lyndon Johnson's escalation of the Vietnam War. As Hersey linked Harry Truman's bombing of Hiroshima and Johnson's bombing of Vietnam within the same spectrum of American military interventions in Asia, he earned the ire of the First Family and raised questions about freedom of speech in the White House itself. Drawing on archival documents in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and the Library of Congress, this article argues that Hersey's literary protest revealed how the premises of cultural freedom that lay at the heart of Cold War American liberalism stirred far more controversy in practice than their placid articulation in theory would have ever suggested.

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• A counselor and an artist: John Steinbeck’s dialogue with Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam war

  The Global Sixties · 2024-01-02

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  This article explores the dialogue that unfolded between the noted American novelist John Steinbeck (1902–1968) and President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973) during the 1960s. In an era in which many American writers and intellectuals loudly protested Johnson for escalating the Vietnam War, Steinbeck stood out as a writer who supported the president's domestic policies on civil rights as well as his foreign policy in Southeast Asia. Drawing on archival documents held in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and the Library of Congress, the article explores how Steinbeck's years-long dialogue with Johnson linked liberal ideals for literature and government that are more often held apart in studies of Cold War America. Ultimately, this approach reveals that the unusual bond that formed between novelist and president articulated a measure of the complexity of Cold War American liberalism itself, which in the 1960s promoted the noble cause of civil rights at home while at the same time justifying disastrous military interventions against communism in the name of "freedom" abroad.

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• On the Aesthetics and Politics of Neoconservatism in Postwar Japan and America

  Comparative Literature Studies · 2024

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  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Aesthetics

  ABSTRACT This article explores the aesthetic and political dimensions of neoconservative thought in postwar Japan and America. Although neoconservatism today is most often associated with hawkish foreign policy positions and the mythos of American hegemony, it first emerged in the realm of 1960s and post-1960s cultural criticism, much of which was composed by right-of-center literary intellectuals in particular. This article explores how in that earlier context, one of the most distinctive models for answering the cultural questions that motivated the emergence of neoconservatism as an article of global thought appeared in a body of writing centered on Japan. Putting the ideas expressed by the noted American neoconservatives Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz into dialogue with the writings of the conservative Japanese literary critic Etō Jun, the ruminations on Japanese cultural conservatism by the American scholar of Japanese literature Edward Seidensticker, the memoirs of the Sony CEO Morita Akio and the former Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzō, and the writings of the noted Japanese neoconservative novelist-turned-politician Ishihara Shintarō, the article argues that the articulation of neoconservative ideals in postwar Japan ultimately provided a model to conservative market advocates worldwide for how to integrate the seemingly incompatible logics of community and capitalism through a cultural synthesis.

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• Transwar Japanese Thought at “the End of Ideology”

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2024

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  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • History

  Abstract In 1957, the Japanese affiliate of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international anticommunist organization dedicated to the liberal ideals of the “free world,” convened a symposium under the title “Tradition and Transition in Japanese Culture” (“Nihon bunka no dentō to hensen”). The event put noted Kyoto School intellectuals who had earlier conceptualized Japan's unique mission within world history during the war years—including Kōsaka Masaaki, Suzuki Shigetaka, and Nishitani Keiji—into dialogue with postwar thinkers who advocated for freedom of thought in opposition to what they viewed as the closed-mindedness of ideology. Drawing on rarely cited archival documents, this article explores how the symposium raised key questions about the fate of world historical thinking in transwar Japan at the same time that it tested the putative universality of postwar liberal ideals against what the symposium participants called the particularity of Japanese culture.

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• Overcome by the Literary

  Harvard University Asia Center eBooks · 2022-09-29

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• Tracing the Neoliberal Aesthetic in 1980s Japan

  Harvard University Asia Center eBooks · 2022-09-29

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• A Worldly World in Fiction and Philosophy

  Harvard University Asia Center eBooks · 2022-09-29

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• Middlebrow as Method

  Harvard University Asia Center eBooks · 2022-09-29

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• Confluence and Conflict

  2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Literature

  Writers and intellectuals in modern Japan have long forged dialogues across the boundaries separating the spheres of literature and thought. This book explores some of their most intellectually and aesthetically provocative connections in the volatile transwar years of the 1920s to 1950s. Reading philosophical texts alongside literary writings, the study links the intellectual side of literature to the literary dimensions of thought in contexts ranging from middlebrow writing to avant-garde modernism, and from the wartime left to the postwar right. Chapters trace these dynamics through the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s collaboration with the nativist linguist Yamada Yoshio on a modern translation of The Tale of Genji; the modernist writer Yokomitsu Riichi’s dialogue with Kyoto School philosophers around the question of “worldliness”; the Marxist poet Nakano Shigeharu’s and the philosopher Tosaka Jun’s thinking about prosaic everyday language; and the postwar rumination on liberal society that surrounded the scholar Edwin McClellan while he translated Natsume Sōseki’s classic 1914 novel Kokoro as a graduate student in the United States working with the famed economist Friedrich Hayek. Revealing unexpected intersections of literature, ideas, and politics in a global transwar context, the book concludes by turning to Murakami Haruki and the resonances of those intersections in a time closer to our own.

  PublisherDOI