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The Japanese program in the Department of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature cordially invites you to join us for the film screening event of a Japanese film, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Wife of a Spy, followed by Dr. Marie Thorsten’s talk.

1. Film Screening

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, dir. Wife of A Spy (2021)

The film can be watched by the following link with your Baruch ID.

https://cuny-bb.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01CUNY_BB/9ca7v4/alma9994461449006122

2. Dr. Marie Thorsten’s Lecture

Dr. Marie Thorsten will discuss two Japanese films Sea and Poison (Kumai Kei, 1986) and Wife of a Spy (Kurosawa Kiyoshi, 2021). Her lecture, entitled “Visual within Visual: Ethics of Viewing,” draws attention to the visual medium within the medium to bring focus to the act of viewing itself. This lecture is funded by the WSAS dean’s office (Global Lecture Series), organized by the Japanese Program at Baruch College. The flyer was made by Baruch Japan Club.

Date: March 11th, 2022 (Friday)

Time: 11:30 am to 1:00 pm during the class of “Film and Moving Image Culture in Japan” (open to the Baruch community)

Venue: on Zoom (Register for access to the Zoom link below)

https://forms.gle/Zqj7ktCumTeC7wMX6

Contact: Shige (CJ) Suzuki, PhD
E-mail: [email protected]

To major Japanese, there is an option offered through the CUNY B.A. Program. See more information: https://cunyba.cuny.edu/

Also, you might want to check out this “Japan Studies at CUNY” website. There are many Japan-related courses across CUNY campuses: https://tokyo2021.commons.gc.cuny.edu/japan-studies-at-cuny/

2021 Critical Language Scholarship Program

Time & Location

October 20, 8pm EDT
Online (RSVP here)

About

The Japan Foundation, New York launched a monthly online series delving into Japanese pop culture from academic and professional perspectives.

For our second session, we will analyze two of the most iconic animes: Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion, both of which have been producing new works since their release 25 years ago.

These works are two massive monuments in the anime canon, both emerging as cyberpunk epics in the mid-1990s, each addressing issues of identity and the potential for technological interventions. However, they both manage to do so in different ways and with differently composed subjects. This discussion will address both the interesting similarities, but more compellingly, the particular differences with which Oshii and Anno understood this cyberpunk discourse. Two experts—Dr. Susan Napier and Dr. Stevie Suan—will help us to unravel these complex and fascinating anime works.

Dr. Frenchy Lunning will moderate the discussion.

It will be followed by a live Q&A session. If you have any questions about the two titles, please feel free to ask about it on the Eventbrite page when you register. Live commentary will also be enabled on the YouTube stream, so you can participate in the live Q&A.

RSVP here.

This is a free event. Registrants will receive the link to the stream via email. The date and time of the event are Eastern Time. Please check your local time zone.

To view the first session, “Roundtable: Why Do We Study Anime and Manga?”, click here.

Speakers

Dr. Susan Napier

Susan Napier is the Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric and Professor of Japanese Studies at Tufts University. She teaches courses on Japanese culture, including a seminar on Miyazaki, and also on comparative film and literature, including a course on “The Cinema of Apocalypse” and one on “Fantasy in World Culture.”

Dr. Napier has written five books. Her first two books were on Japanese literature. In the early 1990’s she became interested in comics and animation in general and in Japanese manga and animation in particular and has published two books on Japanese animation and numerous articles and book chapters. She is now considered one of the leading authorities on Japanese animation in the world and in 2018 published Miyazakiworld (Yale University Press), a study of the great Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki. The book came out in paperback and is being translated into eight languages.

> Official Website

Dr. Stevie Suan

Stevie Suan is an Assistant Professor at Hosei University in the Faculty of Global and Interdisciplinary Studies. He holds a doctorate in Manga Studies from the Graduate School of Manga Studies at Kyoto Seika University and received his MA in Asian Studies from the University of Hawai‛i at Mānoa. His main area of expertise is in anime aesthetics through which he explores various modes of existence. In his recent research, he uses performance/performativity theory and media theory to approach issues of area studies (Japan studies and Asian studies), using anime as a prime example of the shifting currents of cultural production and consumption in our moment of globalization.

Dr. Suan is on the Steering Committee for the Mechademia Asia Conference, held every 2 years at the Kyoto International Manga Museum. He is also an associate editor for the Mechademia: Second Arc journal, as well as on the editorial board of the journal for the Japan Society of Animation Studies.

> Official Website

Dr. Frenchy Lunning

Frenchy Lunning has written two books—Subcultural Fashion: Fetish Style (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Cosplay: The Masque of Fandom (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)—and is working on a third, Revolutionary Girl: Shōjo. She has also written various essays in anthologies and journals. The director of the academic conferences SGMS: Mechademia Conference on Asian Popular Cultures in both the US and in Asia, she was also the editor-in-chief of Mechademia, a completed ten-volume book series published by the University of Minnesota Press, and is now co-editor-in-chief of the new Mechademia: Second Arc journal, the first issue in spring of 2019.

> Official Website

Fall 2020 Harman Writer-in-Residence: Xiaolu Guo

Born in China, Xiaolu Guo is a writer and filmmaker. Her feature She, a Chinese (2009) is a movie that won the top award at the Locarno International Film Festival. The first of her novels to be written in English, “A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers,” has been translated into 26 languages, and her 2017 memoir, Nine Continents, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.

Guo will be teaching JRN 3650/3650H Visual Narratives: Writing for Film and Television. Her course will focus on the role of the screenwriter and examine various methods of developing a dramatic screenplay. In-class workshops will address the construction of dialogue, characters, scenes, and stories, as students learn to edit and critique their own and others’ work.

Learn more about Guo through her personal website and her Baruch Library Resource Guide.

JOIN US OCTOBER 20 FOR A READING AND CONVERSATION WITH FALL 2020 HARMAN WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE XIAOLU GUO

By way of Introduction:

Edo Avant Garde reveals the pivotal role Japanese artists of the Edo era (1603 ~ 1868) played in setting the stage for the “modern” art movement in the West. During the Edo era, bold Japanese artists innovated abstraction, minimalism, geometric composition and the illusion of 3-D. Their originality is most striking in images of nature depicted on large-scale folding screens. Scholars, priests, curators and collectors trace the artists’ ingenuity to their profound engagement with the natural world and their reverence for the spirits inhabiting it, inspired by Buddhism and Shinto animism.

To capture the dynamism, scale and meticulous details of the art, we filmed two hundred folding screens and hanging scrolls in museums and private collections across the U.S. and Japan, along with remote temples and shrines and in the bamboo groves, misted valleys and churning waves that inspired the artists centuries ago. We received special permission to film the works without protective glass, many in sunlight, one in candlelight, the way Japanese people experienced them centuries ago. The film is a meditative cinematic assemblage of masterpieces only made possible by my unprecedented access.

I hope you enjoy my film

and can share the link with your friends.

Thank you,

Linda Hoaglund

Director/Producer

Edo Avant Garde

Weissman School of Arts & Sciences presents: Charlotte Brooks, American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901-1949

Newman Vertical Campus, Room 13-155, 55 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Weissman School of Arts & Sciences presents: Charlotte Brooks, American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901-1949
https://www.alumni.baruch.cuny.edu/…/event-…/~occur-id/11610