Lafcadio Hearn: Exhibition and Symposium in Durham, September 2015

Lafcadio Hearn: Exhibition and Symposium – at Teikyo University of Japan in Durham / Ushaw College in September 2015.

This exhibition and symposium will celebrate the achievements of Lafcadio Hearn. The exhibition will run from the 19 to 26 September and the symposium will be held on 25 September.

The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation is delighted to be supporting this project with a Daiwa Foundation Small Grant.

Lafcadio Hearn, known in Japan as Koizumi Yakumo, was born in 1850 on the Greek island of Levkás. He grew up in Dublin and was educated at Ushaw College, Durham, where his name appears in college records as Patrick Hearn.

After working as a journalist in the United States and the West Indies, in 1890 Hearn travelled to Japan for Harper’s Magazine. He eventually gave up his work with the magazine and worked as a schoolteacher in Izumo in south-western Japan. There he met and married Koizumi Setsu. In 1895 he became a Japanese subject, taking the name Koizumi Yakumo, Koizumi being his wife’s family name.

His articles on Japan were published in The Atlantic Monthly and in several newspapers in the United States. These essays and others were collected and published as Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894). From 1896 to 1903, Hearn was Professor of English Literature at the Imperial University of Tokyo. Four books written at this time reflect his deep interest in the literature and culture of Japan: Exotics and Retrospective (1898), In Ghostly Japan (1899), Shadowings (1900), and A Japanese Miscellany (1901). Kwaidan (1904), published the year he died, includes Hearn’s stories of the supernatural.

Lafcadio Hearn exhibition in Durham, website