Professor Takeshi Kawashima

Takeshi Kawashima is a Professor of English Literature at Doshisha University.

Takeshi Kawashima began his academic career at the University of Tokyo as a graduate student studying the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. After receiving his PhD, he has published a monograph based on his doctoral dissertation and two co-edited books.

Professor Kawashima has also developed an intellectual interest in the director’s role in Western theatre. His second book, The Birth of the Theatre Director: Theatre’s Modernity and its Transition, notes that by the end of the nineteenth century, the director’s role had become an independent profession, occupationally distinct from actors, playwrights and other theatre staff. Exploring the innovations of the directing methods of Edward Gordon Craig, Constantin Stanislavski, Bertolt Brecht and Peter Brook, the book discusses how this independence of the profession of ‘director’ fundamentally changed the way theatre is produced and performed.

Since 2013, Professor Kawashima has been researching the radio dramas produced and broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation. His analysis of texts written by Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice, and Samuel Beckett focuses on how the limitations of radio drama, which is produced solely based on sound and voice, stimulated the writers’ imaginations. My research now encompasses radio dramas and speech texts by W. B. Yeats, J. B. Priestley and others. The project will examine how writers addressed the public through radio from the 1920s to the 1950s.

From around 2019, he began researching youth literature in the UK. His third book, British Youth Literature: Youth’s Struggle into Adulthood in the Transition from Empire to Welfare State, was published in 2022. It analyses the representation of youth facing difficulties in growing up in the works of Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, J. M. Barrie, and the Angry Young Men along with the modern and contemporary history of Britain from imperialism to the welfare state.