About
In Judith Pascoe's most recent book, On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë: “Wuthering Heights” in Japan, completed with the support of a Guggenheim fellowship, she wrote about Japanese versions of Emily Brontë’s novel, and also about intellectual mastery, foreign language learning, and literary longing. As a 2025 NEH Public Scholar, she is writing about Jane Taylor, the author of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” in a book that explores the fraught relationship between women and literary ambition. You can read her piece about the NEH Public Scholar grant termination here: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article303991626.html
Featured Work
On the Bullet Train with Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights in Japan
While teaching in Japan, Judith Pascoe was fascinated to discover the popularity that Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights has enjoyed there. Nearly one hundred years after its first formal introduction to the country, the novel continues to engage the imaginations of Japanese novelists, filmmakers, manga artists, and others, resulting in numerous translations, adaptations, and dramatizations. On the Bullet Train with Emily Brontë is Pascoe’s lively account of her quest to discover the reasons for the continuous Japanese embrace of Wuthering Heights. At the same time, the book chronicles Pascoe’s experience as an adult student of Japanese. She contemplates the multiple Japanese translations of Brontë, as contrasted to the single (or nonexistent) English translations of major Japanese writers. Carrying out a close reading of a distant country’s Wuthering Heights, Pascoe begins to see American literary culture as a small island on which readers are isolated from foreign literature.
