Antonin Ferré is an interdisciplinary scholar of Ancient Japan with core interests in the literature and history of the Heian period (794–1185).

Growing at the intersection of these two disciplines, his dissertation “Autobiography and the Culture of Archives in Classical Japan” interrogates the understudied connection between autobiographical literature and less personal forms of record-keeping (e.g. private notes by high-ranking aristocrats, records of public celebrations, and palace accounts by prominent ladies-in-waiting) that have traditionally been cordoned off the perimeter of “literature.” Positing against these divisions a unified culture of the archive—as suggested by the shared participation of these texts in the bibliographic category of nikki (literally “dated record”)—the dissertation’s goal is two-fold: delineating, on the one hand, the historical-cultural context for the emergence of autobiography in the Japanese tenth century; and promoting, on the other, a new literary understanding of autobiographical texts themselves, by directing our attention to the authors’ creative appropriation—i.e. subversion—of the norms of the “dated record.”

Part of these results, as well as incidental studies adjacent to this project, have appeared in a series of peer-reviewed journals as well as two edited volumes. A third book chapter, dedicated to the account of Retired Emperor Kazan’s (968–1008) pilgrimages to Shoshazan, is forthcoming in 2025. And work is underway on an article-length manuscript dealing with the reception of Chinese historiographical models in Ancient Japan.

Prior to coming to Princeton, Antonin received undergraduate and graduate degrees from France’s INALCO and studied for seven years at the University of Tokyo, where he was successively a non-degree graduate research student, an M.A. student, and a Ph.D. candidate (ABD).