Research Members’ Profiles
― Research Fields and Responsibilities ―
Research Representative: Fusami Ogi
(Specialty: American Women’s Comics and Shôjo Manga)
Her main research interests include Japanese and international manga and women’s comics from the perspectives of Feminism and Gender Studies, in particular, to determine whether or not the increasing number of creators and readers of domestic and international manga and women’s comics acquire greater potential for subjective female expression and perception. She is responsible for the coordination of all aspects of the project team’s research, as well as for cooperation with the Japan Society for Studies in Cartoon and Comics.
Joint Deputy Representative: Kotaro Nakagaki
(Specialty: The Absence of Women in Traditional USA Comics)
His main research interest is the re-examination of the historical absence of the awareness of women in American comics through an analysis of the contemporary cultural position that women hold in the USA. He is responsible for core materials gathering and database preparation, as well as cooperation with the International Exchange Division of the Japan Society for Studies in Cartoon and Comics.
Joint Deputy Representative: Yukari Yoshihara
(Specialty: Western and Asian Views of Manga)
She is part of the team which translated the Manga Shakespeare series (London: Independent Publisher SelfMadeHero, 2007) for the non-English-speaking world from the original English into such languages as Korean, Japanese, Spanish and Chinese. As part of her activities, she has analyzed manga as high level pop culture and also as the globalization of local culture. She has liaised between European manga artists and Asian researchers as part of her research into the connections in manga culture between Western and Asian women writers.
Joint Deputy Representative: Jaqueline Bernt
(Speciality: Manga and Shôjo Manga in Eastern Europe)
She has liaised between European manga researchers and artists, and has been integral in arranging various international symposia in Europe. Her main research interest concerns the reception of Japanese manga abroad, with a focus on Shôjo Manga in Germany as a representative example. Her research concerns the connections between women’s comics and the indeterminate nature of the female identity that they depict.
Research Collaborator: Akiko Mizoguchi
(Specialty: Yaoi/Boy’s Love)
Her research concerns informative reporting and critical analysis of the male homosexual love genre of Lily Hoshino’s Yaoi Manga series, which is derived from Shôjo Manga, from the viewpoint of the sexual desire contained in subjective female expression. She has so far developed a research activity network beyond Japan to such areas as USA, Croatia and Brazil and so on, and thus contributed to an increasingly global perspective of the genre.
Research Collaborator: John A. Lent
He is a full professor at Temple University, America, and a leading authority in comics research. He liaises with comic artists and researchers in Asia and America, coordinating the dissemination of information relating to research results. He is chief editor of International Journal of Comic Art, Popular Culture Association and International Comics Art Forum and integral in academic organization operations.
Trina Robbins（HERstorian of women and comics, Author and Researcher of History of Women’s Comics, and Women’s Comics Artist）
Trina Robbins began as one of the pioneers of the underground comics movement, publishing her first strip in an underground newspaper in 1966. In 1970 she produced the very first all-woman comics anthology, It Ain’t Me Babe, and in 1972 helped found the groundbreaking Wimmen’s Comix Collective—which produced the first comic book series to deal with such feminist issues as abortion and sexuality.
Robbins has published numerous comics and books:
Women and the Comics(1985)、A Century of Women Cartoonists (1993)、 The Great Women Super Heroes (1996)、 From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines (1999)、The Great Women Cartoonists (2001), The Brinkley Girls: The Best of Nell Brinkley’s Cartoons From 1913-1940(2009), and so on.
CJ (Shige) Suzuki（Assistant Professor, Modern Languages and Comparative Literature at Baruch College, The City University of New York）
CJ Suzuki received his Ph.D. in Literature from University of California at Santa Cruz in 2008. He has published articles on Japanese literature, popular culture, and manga/comics, including “Manga/Comics Studies from the Perspective of Science Fiction Research: Genre, Transmedia, and Transnationalism” in Jaqueline Berndt ed. Comics Worlds and the World Comics: Towards Scholarship on a Global Scale.) and “Learning from Monsters: Mizuki Shigeru’s Yõkai and War Manga” in Image [&] Narrative. His current research lies in the fields of Japanese speculative fiction, manga/comics studies, posthumanism, and cultural theory.
Lim Cheng Tju（AEDENA, editorial & communications, Singapore）
Akiko Shimada (Lecturer, Kansai University of Foreign Languages)
Women's MANGA Research Project
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) No. 21320044
"Research in Women's Manga: Subjectivity, Globalization, and the Possibilities for Expression"