Van C. Gessel

Van C. Gessel is Humanities Professor of Japanese at BYU. He received his BA at the University of Utah, and his MA and PhD degrees in Japanese at Columbia University. He has worked on the faculty at Columbia, Notre Dame, and the University of California at Berkeley. After coming to BYU in 1990, he served as chair of the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and as the dean of the College of Humanities. He has written two scholarly books on modern Japanese literature, co-edited two anthologies of twentieth-century Japanese fiction, and translated seven literary works by the Japanese Christian novelist Endō Shūsaku. He expresses appreciation to Daryl Hague for his insights into translation theory and for making materials available that have improved this article.