معرفی
Liesl Yamaguchi is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, currently on teaching leave for the 2025-26 academic year. Her interdisciplinary scholarship bridges literary theory, linguistics, and the history of science with a focus on post-revolutionary France.
Her educational background includes:
- PhD and MA from Princeton University
- MSt from the University of Oxford
- BA from Columbia College of Columbia University
Yamaguchi's research centers on poetry and poetics, 19th-century French literature, and intersections of literary theory (especially structuralism) with the history of linguistics. She investigates synesthesia as a nexus between sensory perception and language, as demonstrated in her monograph On the Colors of Vowels: Thinking through Synesthesia (Fordham UP, 2025). Her work extends to Finnish literature through translation and critical analysis, revealing cross-cultural connections in literary modernism.
Her 2019-2025 publications reveal persistent engagement with synesthetic phenomena, structuralist frameworks, and poetic form across Scandinavian and French contexts. Key thematic threads include color-sound correspondences in linguistic history, anatomical metaphors in prosody, and representations of silence in Nordic narratives. This body of work demonstrates methodological range spanning archival research, translation studies, and cognitive literary analysis.
Scientific awards include:
- 2018 Ralph Cohen Prize for "Sensuous Linguistics: On Saussure’s Synesthesia"
Yamaguchi actively mentors graduate and undergraduate students across disciplines, welcoming inquiries from those exploring structuralism, sensory studies, or Nordic literatures. She is currently developing a second monograph examining the entanglement of anatomical terminology (feet, dactyls, enjambments) with poetic form.
