Stefania Burk, a Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Languages, will be working during the tenure of her fellowship on a dissertation entitled Reading Between the Lines: Poetry and Politics in the Imperial Anthologies of Japan, 1275-1350. Burk’s study explores Japan’s most significant premodern anthologization enterprise–the imperially commissioned anthologies of poetry–and addresses the poetry/politics nexus that animated the compilation, reception, and preservation of these collections that stand at the center of the Japanese literary canon. This is to attempt not only an assessment of the dynamic extra-literary impulses that propelled and informed the compilation of these anthologies but to consider as well how these anthologies of poetry captured the attention (and imaginations) of contemporary circles, asserting or inscribing political authority as well as literary legitimacy.