Dr Patrick Carland-Echavarria
Patrick Carland-Echavarria is a cultural historian of queer literature, politics, and media in modern Japan. He received his MA in Japanese from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and his PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania. His doctoral research and current book project examine how Japan’s relative legal and cultural tolerance towards homosexuality after World War II made it an attractive refuge for a generation of gay scholars and translators of Japanese seeking to escape rising homophobia in their own countries. Tracing the lives of these translators and the Japanese artists and writers they collaborated with, it shows how this unexamined historical phenomenon helped to facilitate a postwar renaissance of Japanese literature in English translation from the early 1950s to the 1970s.
He has published articles on topics including LGBTQ activism in contemporary Japan, gay subcultures in Occupation-era Tokyo, anime adaptations of classic children’s literature, and depictions of queerness in modern Japanese art. He is also an experienced art curator, having most recently worked on the exhibition The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869–1939.
