His most current and ambitious project involves the complete academic translation into English of the Man'yōshū (ca. 759), the earliest and the largest premodern Japanese poetic anthology, alongside with the critical edition of the original text and commentaries.
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Alexander Vovin earned his M.A. in structural and applied linguistics from the Saint Petersburg State University in 1983, and his Ph.D. in historical Japanese linguistics and premodern Japanese literature from the same university in 1987, with a doctoral dissertation on the Hamamatsu Chūnagon Monogatari (ca. 1056).
Shell Games: Studies in Frauds, Scams and Deceit in Early Modern Culture, 1300-1650 with Mark Crane and Margaret Reeves (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2004) and The Devil in Society in Premodern Europe (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012) with Peter Dendle (Penn State Mont Alto).
As Gosch explains “premodern world system was to some extent an “archipelago of towns” in which urban centers in Europe (Bruges, Ghent, Genoa and Venice), the Middle East (Cairo, Aden, and Hormuz), and Asia (Samarkand, Calicut, Kanchipuram, Malacca, Quanzhou and Hangzhou) were connected to one another by trade and shared in a common culture of commerce.