Monthly Archives: October 2020

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