Wiebke Denecke is a literary scholar, author, and academic who is a Professor of East Asian Literatures and the S. C. Fang Chair for Chinese Language and Culture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Before college, Denecke was trained in Latin and Greek studies in the humanistic Max-Planck-Gymnasium in Göttingen, and received a French baccalaureate in Paris.
She received her academic training in Sinology, Japanology, Korean studies, philosophy, and the history of science, in her native Germany, as well as in Norway, Dalian, Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, and Boston.
Since 2021, she has served as Professor of East Asian Literatures at MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences,[8] and since 2023, she has held the S. C. Fang Chair for Chinese Language and Culture.
He also praised how, behind her personal notes, there is a hidden purpose aimed at making a significant impact, reshaping disciplinary boundaries and taxonomies.
[13] Her second book Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons compared how early Japanese and Roman authors developed their literary traditions through and against the established works of China and Greece.
Additionally, she has served as an Editor for A Companion to World Literature, which includes essays from scholars on key literary topics.
"[18] Denecke is most known for her research on Japan's biliteracy, the production of literature both in classical Japanese and in Literary Chinese, which functioned as cosmopolitan language connecting East Asia, comparable to Latin in the European Middle Ages.