May 11, 2026/ 1:00 PM

TBD

Colloquium with Pier Carlo Tommasi

Gossip is often dismissed as idle chatter. Yet, as social theory has long shown, it is one of the oldest ways people have made sense of one another. It can entertain, strengthen communal bonds, or just as easily become a vehicle for resistance and dissent. Above all, gossip works as a tool of self-positioning: every time we speak about another person’s life, we reveal something about our own—our values, hopes, fears, and the place we occupy in the world.

In this talk, I propose to read gossip as a kind of auto/biography: a contested space where reputations are fashioned, amplified, challenged, and defended. My focus is on Japan after the turn of the thirteenth century, a period when a nascent “celebrity culture” coalesced around the great masters of vernacular poetry (waka), and when gossip began to seep into unexpected domains, from legal codes to literary treatises. But gossip could also wound. Few anxieties loomed larger for medieval people than the sting of slander, and none more so than the warrior class, whose sudden prominence made them vulnerable to attacks. One striking expression of this was rakusho (“graffiti”), satirical lampoons—usually in verse—plastered in public spaces that ridiculed the mighty under a cloak of anonymity.

The purpose of this talk is therefore twofold: first, to recast gossip and counter-gossip as a literary technique by which individuals criticized rivals or reclaimed agency over defamation; and second, to explore how the affective charge of fame and infamy sparked new forms of life-writing, blurring the boundaries between truth-telling, apologia, and invective in the making of public selves.

Pier Carlo Tommasi is Assistant Professor of Japanese at Vassar College. He earned his Ph.D. from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and previously worked at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His research focuses on medieval literature, with a particular interest in samurai culture, manuscripts, and life-writing. His current book project, Writing Warriors: Literary Techniques of the Self in Medieval Japan, examines the self-narratives of heretofore overlooked authors, illuminating how provincial warrior writers reinvented traditional genres and, in doing so, expanded the literary canon with new modes of cultural production and commentary.

Sponsor(s): Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies