Brett de Bary holds a joint appointment with the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell. Her research interests include modern Japanese fiction and film, the Japanese postmodern, comparative literary theory, translation theory and post-colonial theory, and gender and philosophy.

She is currently doing research on a Japanese woman writer, Morisaki Kazue, a member of the influential artist/activist collective "Circle Village" (Saakuru mura) during the political and cultural upheavals surrounding the 1960 renewal of the Japan-U. S. Security Treaty and the historic Mitsui Miike coal mine strike.

She has translated work by Karatani Kojin, Oe Kenzaburo, Nakano Shigeharu, Miyamoto Yuriko, and Morisaki Kazue. She is associate editor of Traces: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory and Translation. She was a member of the Japan Foundation American Advisory Council from 1995-2002. She has held Fulbright, Japan Foundation, and Social Science Research Council fellowships.