Brian Hurley’s first exposure to Japanese studies, as a kid in his hometown of Columbia, Missouri, was somewhat serendipitous. When he was in junior high school, a local summer program offered a six-week Japanese language class, taught by a university student. “One thing about growing up in a college town is you’re exposed to folks who are studying all sorts of things,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh, that sounds interesting.’ So I went.” He continued studying the language in high school, then visited the Japanese city of Hakusan, which happened to be Columbia’s sister city.
“It was really a life-changing experience for me,” he says. “I didn’t have a career interest in mind. I didn’t have a goal. It was just something I was passionate about.” He went on to major in Japanese as an undergraduate at Washington University, initially planning a career in international relations before realizing that his interest in global politics was more academic in nature.
“My interest started to congeal around the humanities, and the way the culture becomes one of the interesting places where politics happened,” he says. “It’s not just government, it’s not just heads of state, it’s not just diplomacy. It’s also the way that writers and thinkers and cultural actors participate in this question of social politics and international relations.”
Today, Hurley is an assistant professor of Asian studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Much of his academic work focuses on the relationship between modern Japanese literature and the ideas that have shaped the modern world, and more broadly on “the fundamental question of how literature and thought talk to each other in the 20th century.”
Hurley, who received his master’s at Arizona State University and his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, joined the UT faculty in 2020. In 2022, he published his first book, Confluence and Conflict: Reading Transwar Japanese Literature and Thought (Harvard Asia Center). The book received an honorable mention for the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Book Prize for East Asian Studies and was a finalist for the Modern Japan History Association Book Prize. He’s now at work on a second book that looks at Japan’s postwar economy through the lenses of literature and thought.
Hurley’s varied interests are guided by his openness to scholarly exploration and interdisciplinary connection, an inclination that can take him, and his students, in unexpected and exciting directions. “You never know where you’re going to find sources of inspiration,” he says. Often, that source is an academic archive. “One of the things that’s made Texas such a great intellectual home for me is that, in addition to my colleagues and the classes that I teach, there are some amazing archives on campus.”
Hurley was on what he describes as “kind of a fishing expedition” at the LBJ Presidential Library when he found inspiration for two recent papers. “I’d never worked with a presidential library before, and this one just happened to be in my backyard,” Hurley says. “And I thought it would be a shame not to poke around and see what I could find.” In particular, he was looking for possible links between his scholarly interests and the cultural and political issues of the 1960s.
He found that link in Johnson’s collected correspondence with the novelist John Steinbeck during the Vietnam War. The two men had met at a White House dinner in 1963 and became friends. Steinbeck helped Johnson write his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination in 1964, and the president awarded the writer the Medal of Freedom later that year. Their letters revealed Steinbeck’s support of the president, including for the war in Vietnam; in fact, the author, who was firmly anti-Communist, spent several months there as a war correspondent.
Nonetheless, when Johnson invited Steinbeck to serve as master of ceremonies at a White House Festival of the Arts in 1965, the author declined, citing, in part, a desire to steer clear of political associations. “He was very staunchly independent in that sense, even though, ironically, he had this whole conversation he was carrying on with the White House at the same time,” notes Hurley, who examined the complexity of the two men’s relationship in “A Counselor and an Artist: John Steinbeck’s Dialogue with Lyndon Johnson During the Vietnam War,” published in 2024 in The Global Sixties: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
That declined invitation, meanwhile, sent Hurley down a new path of inquiry: the festival that Steinbeck declined to attend.
The event was intended to showcase contemporary American culture, Hurley wrote in “Reading Hiroshima in the Age of Vietnam: John Hersey at the White House Festival of the Arts,” published in March 2024 in The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. It was also an attempt to promote the Johnson administration’s support of the arts, including the establishment of the National Endowments for the Humanities and for the Arts. “At the core of both the festival and the legislation was the seemingly noncontroversial idea that the American government supports the creative freedom of artists and intellectuals,” Hurley wrote.
But things didn’t go as planned for the White House. Delving into the LBJ archives’ records from the festival, Hurley learned that Steinbeck wasn’t the only artist to have political misgivings about the event. In a public letter to the president, poet Robert Lowell refused to attend, as an act of protest against the escalation of the war. A number of other artists and writers — Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Robert Penn Warren, Philip Roth — joined Lowell in his boycott.
The novelist and journalist John Hersey, however, decided to bring his protest right to the White House. He accepted his invitation and announced his plan to do a reading from Hiroshima, his deeply affecting 1946 work about the aftermath of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Japan. “Hersey’s literary protest exposed how the practice of cultural freedom became difficult to tolerate for the very White House that claimed to be its champion,” Hurley wrote. “[H]e also tested the premises of cultural liberalism at home in Cold War America, revealing the complexity of the very ideals that were often said to inform the inviolable ethos and moral authority of American leadership in the free world.”
Back in the archives, Hurley was excited to come across this unexpected link to his field. “Hersey went to the White House in 1965, just as the Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movements are happening, and read excerpts of this 20-year-old text as an act of protest against Johnson’s military aggressions and Cold War interventions into Southeast Asia,” he says. “This is an interesting way of thinking about an afterlife of Hiroshima through Vietnam.”
Hurley admits to finding the Festival of Arts project initially intimidating. “I’m not a scholar of American politics, and I’m not any kind of authority on LBJ’s policy initiatives.” But he realized that his background in Asian studies gave him a perspective that political scholars could not bring to the research. “Being an outsider to certain conversations can be a virtue, if it allows you to see something and say something that maybe the others haven’t yet said.”
Hurley brought that fresh perspective to his teaching and research on another unexpected topic: the Tarzan novels. That work also began in an open-ended exploration of an academic archive, this one at the Japanese and Japanese American Studies section of the UCLA Library Special Collections. “I stumbled across the Edgar Rice Burroughs papers, and I thought: Wow, what did he have to do with Japan?” Hurley recalls. He began digging and learned that Burroughs had moved from California to Hawaii in 1940 and, the following year, was playing a Sunday morning tennis match when he witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The experience affected Burroughs deeply. Too old to serve in the military, he decided to become a war correspondent in the South Pacific. He also wrote essays about the aftermath of the attack on the U.S., including the internment of Japanese Americans.
Eventually, Burroughs brought Tarzan into the story as well. In one of his final novels, 1947’s Tarzan and the Foreign Legion, Burroughs had his hero, by then a member of the Royal Air Force, shot down behind enemy lines on Sumatra. He then joined forces with American and Dutch comrades to fight their way out. “It’s the story of jungle survival in a World War II context, where the Japanese are the great adversaries,” Hurley says. In “Transpacific Tarzan: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Japanese Internment, and America’s Pacific War” (forthcoming in Verge: Studies in Global Asias), Hurley examines how Burroughs, whose early Tarzan novels told the story of the triumph of white colonists over the dangers of “uncivilized” places, brought those themes of race, freedom, and empire to his later writings about Japan, at a time when America was exerting its political and military power in the Pacific region.
Those themes, Hurley realized, also lent themselves well to a Signature Course. Every first-year UT Austin student is required to take a Signature Course, which is designed to introduce them to college-level academics through a topic they haven’t studied before. In Hurley’s course, “Tarzan and Twentieth-Century America,” which he taught for the first time in the fall of 2024, students read the original Tarzan of the Apes alongside works that provide context for the issues raised in the novel. At the start of the semester, for example, the class considered the question of whether Tarzan is truly free, through the lens of works by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke on the tensions between the state of nature and governed society.
“It’s a classic question of what it means to be a human being in the modern world. What is freedom, what is control, what’s the role of government?” Hurley says. “We had great conversations about questions of freedom, of enlightenment, of empire, of gender and sexuality and race and class and all those fundamental questions of humanities inquiry.” As in all Signature Courses, the goal is to help students develop “their own capacity for judgment … and feel empowered to think about their own place in contemporary society with a historical lens.”
Indeed, that’s always Hurley’s goal in the classroom: to use his subject expertise to help students develop skills that have broad applications — the ability to think critically, to contextualize, to understand others’ perspectives — “to make a bridge between a set of skills that are useful for scholarship and a set of skills that are useful for citizenship,” he says.
“Ultimately, what I hope students leave with is not a set of answers as much as questions about how they want to participate in their own world,” he continues. “I’m not trying to teach you to think like Brian Hurley. I’m not trying to inculcate some sort of disciplinary orthodoxy or conventional wisdom. Quite to the contrary, I hope students leave the classroom and realize that the world is richer and more meaningful than they had realized before, and that, ultimately, it’s up to them to decide what kind of a citizen they want to be.”