MANIERI ANTONIO

Antonio Manieri is Associate Professor in Japanese Studies at the University of Naples L’Orientale, Italy. In 2012, he received his PhD in Japanese Philology from Daito Bunka University (Tokyo), with a thesis on practical documents, terminology, and literature related to horses in the “code-based state” Japan (eighth-tenth c.). He benefited from The Japan Foundation Scholarship (2004), the MEXT Scholarship (2007-2009 and 2009-2012), a research fellowship at the Institute for Research in Language Teaching in Tokyo (2006), a post-doc fellowship at the University of Naples L’Orientale (2014-2018), and The Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Fellowship 2023. He is a member of several centers of research (CESET, CETEFIL, CSAO), national and international research projects (PRIN, KAKEN), of the “Senchū Wamyōruijushō Study Group” (Tokyo/Kyoto).
His research interests center on encyclopedism, legal and geographical texts, and practical or technical knowledge in ancient Japan (eighth–thirteenth centuries). In particular, he investigates how technical and artisanal knowledge was shared and developed within communities of practice—laborers, lexicographers, scholars, and clerks—in the ancient state. He is currently working on a monograph on early Japanese hippology (eighth–eleventh centuries), examining terminology, knowledge systems, and practices as they appear across various types of sources, including dictionaries and encyclopedias, practical and bureaucratic documents on mokkan or paper, treatises, illustrated scrolls, etc.
He has taken and takes part in several surveys and cataloging projects of Japanese manuscripts and early printed editions Italian and Vatican libraries and archives. He is involved in projects related to Classical Japanese and Sinitic in Japan, collaborating with the Classical Japanese–English Digital Dictionary Concept Development Team (Yanai Initiative, UCLA/Waseda) and co-authoring a handbook of Classical Japanese language (Hoepli, 2025).