Nathaniel Gallant is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He was a first-time attendee of the New Directions in Noh workshop in 2026, where he presented a draft of his dissertation prospectus. 

Coming from a background of religious and literary studies, the New Directions in Noh workshop helped reshape his dissertation’s scope and aims in conversation with a core and ongoing goal of its participants—to actively rethink how to approach noh as a medium in which cultural, political, and religious problems were staged and restaged. As a result of conversations on his and others’ work, his dissertation’s scope and aims speak much more directly to issues in the study of theater/theatrical discourse across North American, European, and Japanese academies, and the direction of his broader research trajectory into intersections of noh, performance studies, and the history of religion in East Asia has more concrete archival and conceptual focus. 

The resultant dissertation prospectus, “The Ends of Esotericism: Body, Text, and Structure in Early Modern Japan,” will now be proposed in the Fall of 2026—ahead of schedule and in a much more developed form thanks to the input and direction of workshop members. He will follow the textualization, canonization, and early public debates on performance convention surrounding a set of plays on poetic exemplars attributed to Konparu Zenchiku (1405 – 1468). The dissertation proposes these plays, which were shaped by the late medieval intersection of poetics and esoteric ritual theory, as a possible heuristic for understanding the role that problems of “textuality” played in reshaping early modern noh’s relationship to religion and theories of early modern forms of “secularity.” By foregrounding how Zenchiku’s noh was read and reread as these plays’ status as “texts” was reshaped by major shifts in early modern print culture, the dissertation will offer a new account of transformations in the discursive conditions under which noh staged intersecting problems of aesthetics, religion, and political conflict between the late 16th to the mid-18th centuries.