David Lurie, Associate Professor of Japanese History and Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, received his B.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard (1993) and his M.A. (1996) and PhD. (2001) in Premodern Japanese Literature from Columbia. His first book was on the development of writing systems in Japan through the Heian period. Entitled *Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing* (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), it received the Lionel Trilling Award in 2012. Other publications include “The Development of Japanese Writing,” in *The Shape of Script: How and Why Writing Systems Change* (SAR Press, 2012) and “Language, Writing, and Disciplinarity in the Critique of the ‘Ideographic Myth’” *Language & Communication* 26 (2006). In addition to the history of writing systems and literacy, his research interests include: the literary and cultural history of premodern Japan; the Japanese reception of Chinese literary, historical, and technical writings; the development of Japanese dictionaries and encyclopedias; the history of linguistic thought; comparative mythology; and world philology. He is currently preparing a new scholarly monograph, tentatively entitled *The Emperor’s Dreams: Reading Japanese Mythology.* Along with Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, he was co-editor of the *Cambridge History of Japanese Literature* (2015), to which he contributed chapters on myths, histories, gazetteers, and early literature in general. Along with Sheldon Pollock, he is the co-organizer of the Columbia Program in World Philology.
