John Bundschuh
Visiting Assistant Professor
Section Head, Japanese
Modern Languages & Literatures-Japanese
Contact
John Bundschuh teaches Japanese language, linguistics, and classical literature at Swarthmore College. After receiving his B.A. in Linguistics and Asian Studies and his M.A. in Linguistics from Tulane University, he spent five years teaching English in the Kansai region of Japan before returning to the states to complete his Ph.D. in Japanese Linguistics at the Ohio State University. His dissertation, titled “Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Creation of Narrative Structure in Japanese Kundokubun Buddhist Texts,” focused on the relationship between narrative structure and the grammatical expression of time in the earliest Japanese translations of Chinese Buddhist sutras. Other research interests include East Asian writing systems, premodern and modern Japanese language pedagogy, linguistic variation, and the history of the Japanese language, in particular shifts in predicate morphology. His current research project is on how Sanskrit grammatical structures in Buddhist texts came to be translated into Japanese via Sinitic, or Chinese, renditions.
