BACKGROUND: 

Wiebke Denecke is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures.  She received her B.A. (1994) and M. A. (1998) from George August University (Göttingen, Germany) and her Ph.D. in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University in 2004. Her interests focus on the history, thought, and literature of premodern China and Japan, on Japanese appropriations of Chinese culture, and, more generally, on strategies of cross-cultural comparison.