Professor Transitions from Tokyo to Pomona
By Lori DesRochers
News Associate

The walls of Peter Flueckiger’s office are covered with literally hundreds of novels, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and anthologies. The spines of the books are lined with Japanese characters, making them indecipherable to everyone but the most dedicated of Japanese scholars, and even then, their contents probably wouldn’t interest most.

“This one is a list of every book written in Japan before the Meiji restoration,” Flueckiger says, his eyes glowing with excitement behind thick-framed glasses. Moving his prized rare book collection from Tokyo, Japan, to Claremont was tough; the transition from graduate school student to professor at Pomona College was not.

During the fall of 2001, Pomona College began the search for a tenure-track assistant professor position in Asian Languages and Literatures. Department heads placed advertisements in academic journals and email list serves, wrote letters to colleges with graduate programs in Asian Studies, and contacted various people in the field.

“We’re very much encouraged to have as diverse as possible of a pool,” explained Lynne Miyake, Professor of Asian Languages and Literatures, and a member of the search committee. The quest for a new professor is different with each position, but the initial national search begins the same way.

At the time, Flueckiger was in Tokyo completing his dissertation on Confucian philosophies of literature in 18th century Japan. He had already received an undergraduate degree in Economics at Harvard University and a PhD in Japanese Literature from Columbia University, and his time as a student was nearly over.

“In grad school, there’s no particular end,” he said, describing the process. “You just work on your dissertation until you decide you want to look for a job.” He’d never been to Southern California but sent in an application to Pomona College. “I told myself not to create any expectations. I didn’t know that much about the school other than the name and the general reputation. I’d never even thought about moving to California,” he said.

After sending in his dossier of curriculum vitae, recommendations, writing samples, and a letter describing his teaching philosophy, he waited to hear from the College. In February they contacted him for a phone interview, and in March they informed him that the field had been narrowed to three applicants, and he was invited to visit the campus.

“He's very down to earth, very approachable. I instantly liked him,” said Dean of the College Gary Kates. “He came across as not only very intelligent, but able to converse about his field with non-experts.”

Flueckiger and the two other applicants were flown to the campus for a whirlwind two days of intensive interviews and meetings with the search committee, professors, deans, and the President of the College. During this visit, applicants are also expected to put on two “performances”— to give a lecture about his or her academic research and to teach a class.

“He was fabulous during his lecture. It was on Tokugawa poetics, which are very difficult and esoteric, but he made them accessible,” said Miyake. “What sold me on him was the fact that three of the undergraduates asked the most amazing questions I’ve ever heard them ask.”

Rachel Chai, a junior at Pitzer, was a student in the beginning Japanese class that each applicant taught. “He was the best of all of them,” she said. “With a couple of them you could tell that they weren’t as qualified, and he definitely seemed the most prepared.”

Flueckiger also remembers the experience fondly. “I was horribly jetlagged, so maybe I didn’t have the energy to be nervous, but it was a very pleasant visit,” he said. “I loved the town, the people I met, everything.”

One week later, he received a phone call saying he’d gotten the job.

“I was ecstatic,” he said. “But then I panicked, because I realized I had to finish writing my dissertation.” He stayed in Japan until November and mailed his completed dissertation to his readers the night before heading to California. “I had the motivation to finish because I had something waiting for me,” he explained.

A week after defending his dissertation in New York, he began teaching a spring semester course in Intermediate Japanese at Pomona. The class was also taught by Lynne Miyake, who sympathized with the struggles of entering during the middle of the school year.

“I think it was tough for him, but he certainly jumped right in. In the beginning, he seemed a little standoffish, but his students came to like him more and more every day,” she said.

“I was coming in at the middle of the year, and I felt swamped,” he said. “I was just trying to stay afloat as best as I could.”

This fall, with courses in Japanese language and his specialty, premodern Japanese literature, he seems much more relaxed, much more at home. Students in his literature course eagerly tell stories of how he explored the nuances of The Gossamer Journal by comparing the whiny complaints of the heroine to emo music.

“He obviously knows his stuff. He’ll pull up a random name or date and relate it to the Japanese literature and history we’re studying,” said Bronwyn Beck ’06, a Japanese Department liaison. “And he gets funnier every day. Sometimes he makes us roll on the floor laughing.”

Back in his office, Flueckier’s favorite used bookstores in Tokyo are now thousands of miles away, and the snowy winters of his Harvard days are melting away with the California sun. “I’m very, very happy here,” he says, resting comfortably in his chair. His colleagues praise him for his thoughtfulness, while his students openly display their adoration for his quirky lectures. It would seem as though he has adapted perfectly, and he would almost have to agree, except for one small detail.

“Some people have been trying to get me to do yoga,” said Flueckiger. “But I think that’s a little too Southern California for me.”