Yohei Igarashi

Associate Professor

English

About

Yohei Igarashi is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. His writing to date focuses on how literature has historically related to communication, information, and technology. His broader interests include the histories of reading, writing, rhetoric, media, and literary criticism.

A specialist in British Romantic literature, he is the author of The Connected Condition: British Romanticism and the Dream of Communication (Stanford University Press, 2020), which recasts Romantic poetry as a response to the beginnings of the information age. He was awarded the Keats-Shelley Association of America’s annual essay prize in 2015 for an article in Studies in Romanticism. He continues to research the relation between literature and information in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Currently he is writing a book about the role of computing in the history of literary studies in the U.S. Parts of this project have appeared in New Literary History and The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age. His other work in the area of computational literary studies include collaborative papers on topics ranging from poetic form to plain writing.

Igarashi’s research has been supported by the National Humanities Center, where he was the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow in 2023–2024, by the UConn Humanities Institute, where he was a fellow in 2024-2025, by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by the UConn Office of the Vice President for Research.

He served on the leadership team at the UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI) from 2019 to 2023, first as Assistant, then Associate, Director. In 2020-2021, he was Acting Director of Academic Affairs at UCHI. Throughout this term, he oversaw the institute’s Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative.