Erick DuPree is a literary anthropologist, translator, and author specializing in pre-feudal Japan and classical Japanese court literature. Their work explores how literature, ritual, and everyday court life shaped ideas of power, desire, gender, and selfhood within elite Japanese cultures.

DuPree’s scholarship centers on Heian-period diaries, narrative prose, and poetic exchange, with particular attention to how intimacy, marriage politics, and social obligation were negotiated through writing. His monograph, Becoming Murasaki Exploring Religious Subtext in the Court Diary of Murasaki Shikibu examines the coexistence of Buddhist, Shinto, and vernacular religious practices at court, and how this pluralism structured ethical life, interior experience, and social belonging.

DuPree’s interest in pre-modern Japan began early, sparked by encounters with Hinamatsuri festival dolls at a children’s museum and later deepened through reading Arthur Waley’s The Tale of Genji in high school. This fascination laid the foundation for a lifelong engagement with Heian women’s writing.

DuPree earned their masters in Japanese History and a doctorate in Anthropology from Queen’s University, where they completed a modern translation and cultural analysis of The Court Diary of Murasaki Shikibu. Their research situates the diary within the lived realities of eleventh-century court society, treating it not only as a canonical literary text but as a record of social maneuvering, religious practice, and emotional life.

Across their work, DuPree is especially interested in diaries and literary fragments as technologies of selfhood—forms that encode desire, constraint, and power in ways that continue to shape contemporary understandings of intimacy and identity.

Dr. DuPree lives on the East Coast with their husband and beloved dogs