East Asian Studies

William Sauter LaPorte '28 Professor in Regional Studies, Professor of Comparative Literature, is currently writing a book on performance in Muromachi culture while translating Zeami's various writings on noh drama (apart from plays themselves). He did his BA in East Asian Studies at Princeton and went to the University of Michigan for his MA and PhD in the Department of Far Eastern Languages and Literatures. He also studied musicology at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts. From 1981 to 2000, he taught in the Department of Asian Languages at Stanford University, joining the Comparative Literature Department there as well in 1990. He moved to Princeton in fall, 2001. He published Zeami's Style: the Noh Plays of Zeami Motokiyo with the Stanford University Press in 1987, and more recently ReMembering Osiris: Number, Gender and the Word in Ancient Egyptian Representational Systems, also with the Stanford Press, in 1999. He has written extensively on early Japanese culture and literature, concentrating on noh, Kûkai and Kamo no Chômei.