Nicholas Brigati

Nicholas Brigati hopes to be a scholar on the interconnectivity between contemporary Japanese and American literature as well as film. He was born and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, and earned a B.A. in English and Literary Arts from Brown University. He arrived at Japanese film studies through his training in English, which developed into a larger academic focus extending to contemporary Japanese literature. Nicholas’s undergraduate thesis examined the film Drive My Car in relation to its intertexts, arguing the film illustrates how the performance of art, and acting in particular, fails to edify its participants.

This experience affirmed his desire to pursue his interest in Japanese studies at Yale, where he hopes to explore traces of an American fantasy within both literature and film. Often in Comparative Literature and Anglo-American sociology, the comparative lens is orientalizing whilst overlooking how Japan itself fetishizes the United States within its own culture. This is deeply present among the authors and filmmakers that appealed to the shin-jinrui generation, who were active during the economic boom of the late 1970s until the bubble burst in the 1990s. Nicholas hopes to examine this trend as a distinct version of Occidentalism specifically towards America.