Ken Noda
NODA, Ken-ichi, the first president of the ASLE-Japan from 1994 to 2000, teaches in the Graduate School of Intercultural Communication at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, Japan. His expertise lies in American literature, nature writing, and environmental literature, and his published work covers American writers like Ralph W. Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Richard Nelson, and Terry Tempest Williams, as well as Japanese environmental writers.
His recent scholarly interest focuses upon the “post-romantic” attitude toward nature found in the contemporary writers. He is the author of the book Correspondence and Representation:The Nature of Nature Writing (Tokyo: Shohakusha, 2003) and the translator of Edward Abbey's The Journey Home. Among his recent articles are “Textualized and De-textualized Nature: Emerson, Thoreau, and Abbey” (2003) and “A Wild Dog Chase: the Represented Wildness in Shinya Fujiwara's Works” (2004).
During his stay at UNR as a visiting scholar, he conducted research specifically on the issue of "associationism" in 19th century American art and literature. Related to this issue, he read a paper called "Where is HERE, When is NOW?: Literary ‘Presentism’ after Romanticism" at the ASLE conference held at the University of Oregon, Eugene.
His forthcoming books include An Encyclopedia of English and American Literature (Fall 2005) and Praxes in Environmental Thinking: Imagination of Place (Fall 2006), and the translation of UNESCO's Teaching and Learning for a Sustainable Future (Summer 2005).
Since 2004, he has been one of the editors of the ASLE-Japan
journal Literature and Environment. He is currently helping to
organize the first international conference to be jointly held by ASLE-Japan
and ASLE-Korea in 2007.