Tatsushi Narita

Born and raised in a city called Nagoya located in mid-Japan, Tatsushi Narita taught English in the hometown for over forty years. He is at present Professor Emeritus, Nagoya City University. Fortunately good luck came his way back in the 1980s as he was delving into an examination of some first-hand materials of the Eliot family preserved in St. Louis, Missouri. He discovered a piece of new factual evidence showing a new fact that the poet T. S. Eliot frequently visited the 1904 World's Fair of St. Louis. Specifically, the piece is Eliot's stockholder's ticket book which was issued by the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company to him. Narita is right now engaged in an entirely new project, basing it on yet another discovery of no less importance concerning T. S. Eliot's biographical aspect during his American days.

Alex Marsh and Elizabeth Däumer characterized part of Narita's theses in the following terms: The larger significance is, first of all, that "the cross-cultural interest shaping the older Eliot's conviction that 'poetry begins...with a savage beating a drum in a jungle' importantly antedates his anthropological studies at Harvard", and second, that "Eliot's seemingly autochthonous modernization (as Pound described it) had a source in his early and critical cognizance of the treatment of indigenous people" (American Literary Scholarship, 2005: 181-82).

Tatsushi Narita has been actively concerned with international conferences. He served the International American Studies Association (IASA) as an Executive Council member for two terms (2003-2007). He was also Co-chair, IASA Committee of Membership, Finance and Development; and Co-Convener, Working Group entitled Asia/ Pacific/ America(s). Focusing on transpacific American studies, he organized relevant sessions. He has given conference papers in Japan, the UK, the USA, the Netherlands, Poland, Korea, India and Cyprus. He is also Founding President, Nagoya Comparative Culture Forum, Japan (NCCF-Japan).

Narita is author and editor of several books, including the latest book of his own entitled "T. S. Eliot and his Youth as 'A Literary Columbus'" (Nagoya: Kogaku Shuppan, 2011). This edition book is complete with 33 original photographs. He was Visiting Scholar at Harvard University at more than several different occasions, working with the late Professor Walter J. Bate, Professor James Engel and Professor Ronald Bush now at St. John's College, Oxford.