Team

Associate Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at Penn State University, Jonathan E. Abel has taught Japanese film for over twenty years and published on the silent film from the 1920s, pink film from the 1960s, and monster films from the 1970s.  His recent book The New Real (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) provides some of the theoretical background for CineMAP by examining the way the constructed and fictional realities represented in new media can transform the world. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled Subtitling the World: Fake News, Fictional Truth, and Social Media which examines this same phenomenon on Twitter and Instagram.

Steven Ridgely is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he teaches courses on modern Japanese literature, popular culture, cinema, and anime. His publications include Japanese Counterculture: The Antiestablishment Art of Terayama Shūji (Minnesota, 2010) as well as articles on Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yokoo Tadanori, and Expo ‘70. Current research interests include the uses of topology in 20th century Japanese cultural production and the problem of Japanese kitsch.

CineMAP Japan 2024 Team
Rami Ghandour received their M.A in Asian Studies from the University of Oregon and a B.A in Asian Studies from Skidmore College. Rami’s interests lie in the intersections of gender and memory in contemporary Japanese culture, focusing on popular cinema and literature. Their M.A thesis focused on the memories of the popular icon Tora-san within a contemporary film continuing the “Its Tough Being a Man” film series.

CineMAP Japan 2024 Team
Dave McLaughlin, MGIS, contributed software development for the CineMAP project. He is a Geospatial Data Visualization Software Engineer at the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences at Penn State University. With a background in web development and geospatial data, he specializes in building interactive web cartography that helps the world connect with the amazing research being done at the university. He is the developer on the Beescape project, which explores the health of pollinators in local landscapes across the United States. Dave lives in York, Pennsylvania.

CineMAP Symposium, May 2024
Phil Kaffen is an associate professor of Japanese and cinema at UNC Charlotte. His research and teaching focuses on visual images, including cinema, animation, photography, and installation. In particular, the role of images in broader social and cultural issues from militarism and war to sovereignty and ecology form the core concerns of his research. He has published on documentary cinema, film and urban space, film philosophy in wartime, and artistic responses to catastrophe.

CineMAP Symposium, May 2024
Sarah Frederick is an Associate Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at Boston University. She specializes in twentieth century Japanese literature and history and relationships among mass media, modern literature, gender, and culture. She has worked extensively on 1920s and 30s women’s print culture, image and text in literature of the 1930s-1950s, and gender and sexuality in modern literature and culture. She teaches courses in all periods of Japanese literature, film, and popular culture, as well as comparative courses on topics such as melodrama as a genre in fiction and cinema, and a course on Tokyo. She is author of Turning Pages (2006) and is writing a biography of Yoshiya Nobuko, whose “Yellow Rose” she has translated (2015).

CineMAP Symposium, May 2024
Diane Wei Lewis is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her book, Powers of the Real: Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan (2019), examines how representations of women and femininity were deployed in popular discourses about film realism. Her essays on gender, labor, and Japanese media have appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Screen, Feminist Media Histories, positions: asia critique, and various edited collections. She is writing a book on women's computer-facing work and information society discourse in Japan from the 1960s to the 1980s.

CineMAP Symposium, May 2024
Sharon Hayashi is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at York University, Toronto, and Vice-Chair of the Art and Cartography Commission of the International Cartographic Association. Recent work has focused on visualizing and archiving spatial practices of artistic and social collectives in Tokyo. Current research projects include the digital mapping archive project Mapping Tokyo Olympics 3.0: The Politics of Demolition and Displacement, and the collaborative gaming project Awa Money/Our Money: Currency, Community, and Sustainability in Rural Japan.

CineMAP Symposium, May 2024
Christine (Christy) Marran is Professor of Japanese Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota. She specializes in the fields of environmental humanities, ecocriticism, critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, literary writing, and cinema studies. In her work, Marran addresses how toxins have deeply impacted lives, and how those in area studies can more deliberately contend with the more-than-human world in this age of rising seas. Her new materialist approach illustrates how ecocriticism can account for things smaller and greater than a selective humanist “we” only if it takes a critical position on cultural exceptionalism.

CineMAP Symposium, May 2024
Michael Raine is Associate Professor in Film Studies at Western University, Canada. His research interests include film studies, cultural studies, and Asian studies with a focus on Japan. His main areas of interest in Japanese cinema are the transition to recorded sound, wartime audiovisual culture, and the cinema of high economic growth. He has published on Ozu Yasujiro's late silent films (2018), Occupied Film Culture in Wartime Shanghai (2018), and Cold War Cinema in Japan (2019). He is co-editor (with Johan Nordström) of The Culture of the Sound Image in Prewar Japan (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and co-editor (with Marcos Centeno) of Developments in the Japanese Documentary Mode (MDPI, 2021). He is also co-editor of the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema.

CineMAP Symposium, May 2024
Anne McKnight teaches and researches Japanese postwar fiction, film and food studies at UC Riverside. Her research also concerns how ethnic difference is understood in non-US terms in Japan. She has published a book on writer Nakagami Kenji (Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity, 2011), as well as essays on pink film, feminist art and obscenity, science films and their experimental forms, and the graphic memoirist Miné Okubo. She is currently working on a book-length translation project on the director Kurosawa Akira, and is interested in experimental documentaries, contents tourism and nature, and interfaces of cartography and urban space.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2014-2024
Samuel Frederick is Professor of German at Penn State and the author of several books on German literature and film, most recently The Redemption of Things (Cornell UP, 2021) and a study of F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (Camden House, 2023).

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2014-2024
Jennifer Anne Boittin is Professor of French, Francophone Studies, and History, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (University of Nebraska Press, 2010) and of Undesirable: Passionate Mobility and Women’s Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919–1952 (University of Chicago Press, 2022) and has published articles in Gender & History and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society, among other journals. Her work focuses on race, gender, class, and sexuality in France, West Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean, and includes collaboration across disciplines.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2014-2024
John Russell is Associate Librarian for the Digital Humanities and Associate Director of the Center for Virtual/Material Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He is a member of an NEH-funded interdisciplinary research team exploring the use of computer vision for studying realism in nineteenth century European painting, as well as co-author of “Beyond Buttonology: Digital Humanities, Digital Pedagogy, and the ACRL Framework,” “Remodeling the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Workshop," and other articles on computer vision and art history, digital humanities librarianship, and collection assessment.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2014-2024
Tara Anthony is a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Specialist in the Donald W. Hamer Center for Maps and Geospatial Information at Penn State University Libraries. She provides geospatial consultations to users, conducts geospatial workshops, and supports geospatial outreach initiatives. She received her MSLS (Information and Library Science) at Clarion University of Pennsylvania, Master of Education (Lifelong Learning and Adult Education) at Penn State University, Master of Science (Geography) at Michigan State University, and undergraduate degree (Geography) at Colgate University.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2020-2022
Jackson Reed is an archivist and musician from the Boston area. In 2020, between semesters of computer science study at Wheaton College, he assisted in cleaning up and migrating an early iteration of the CineMAP database and collecting additional data. He is now working on a master's degree in library and information science at Simmons University. He is currently engaged in cataloging the personal papers of contemporary composer Tod Machover, and intends to pursue further a career in music libraries and archives. In spare time he is a freelance composer for independent video games.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2020-2022
Dr. Jennifer Isasi is an Assistant Research Professor of Digital Scholarship, and the Director of the Digital Liberal Arts Research Initiative, a research support hub to articulate and integrate digital research in projects in the humanities and social sciences, at The Pennsylvania State University. She is also the Managing Editor of the open access journal Programming Historian en español, in which she collaborates with editing, translations, and original lessons. Isasi holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies with a specialization in Digital Humanities from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2020-2022

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2014-16
Kendra McDuffie earned a Ph.D. at Pennsylvania State University in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies in 2023. Her dissertation, “Constructing Whiteness: Racialized and Gendered Depictions of Korea in Transwar Japan” examines colonial Japanese depictions of Korea and Korean bodies in early 20th-century essays, travelogues, paintings, magazines, and literature. Her broader research interests include Korean and Japanese visual and material culture, gender performance, and the interplay of word and image in popular media.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2014-16
Elizabeth Tuttle received her PhD from Penn State and is assistant professor of French at Michigan State University. Her current book project explores the impact of print culture on the complex networks of political activists operating in interwar France. The book tracks French feminists and anti-imperialists who distributed pamphlets, fliers, tracts, and posters in order to understand how the materiality of these texts shaped the movements to which they belonged. Dr. Tuttle’s research has been supported by the Millstone Research Fellowship, the Legacies of the Enlightenment Research Fellowship, and the Chateaubriand Fellowship and has been published by or is forthcoming in Women in French, French Culture, Politics and Society, and the Western Society for French History. She teaches classes on French political activism, literary and filmic representations of social class, and French Indochina.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2014-16
Carl Cornell is Lecturer in French Studies and Landscape Studies at Smith College. He received his PhD from Penn State. Dr. Cornell is a scholar of modern and contemporary France in the fields of French cultural studies, landscape studies, and the environmental humanities. He conducts research on how cities are managing the transition from the industrial age to the era of sustainable development. He is currently writing a book, entitled Recycling Industry: The Livable French City Today, in which he examines how five cities across continental France (Angoulême, Nantes, Lyon, Roubaix, and Cergy-Pontoise) are using cultural initiatives to recycle their former industrial spaces and generate a dynamic sense of place and renewed local identity. He has published part of his findings in a 2018 article that appeared in Contemporary French Civilization, and his research on deindustrialization informed a second article on André Gide’s L’Immoraliste (1902) and Didier van Cauwelaert’s Un aller simple (1994) that appeared in The French Review in 2021.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2014-16
Andrew Jones is Assistant Professor French at Ursinus College and received his PhD from Penn State. Inspired by his experience living in Tours, La Réunion, and Québec, Dr. Jones enjoys introducing students to a wide variety of French-speaking regions and cultures. His interdisciplinary teaching and research bridge twentieth and twenty-first century French and Francophone Studies, Film Studies, Philosophy, and History. Specializing in the cinemas and literatures of postwar France, Francophone Africa, and Francophone Eastern Europe, he has a particular interest in representations of trauma. His current research project explores the notion of testimony through the lens of cinematic storytelling in the wake of extreme human catastrophes including the Holocaust, Colonialism, and the Gulag.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2014-16
Nobuto Sato is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation explores auditory representations such as voice, sound, and music in literary modernisms in English, Yiddish, and Japanese.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2014-16
Dr Heather Froehlich is the Digital Scholarship Specialist at the University of Arizona Libraries; she was the Literary Informatics Librarian at Penn State University from 2017-2022. She supports a range of digital scholarship activities, with a particular focus on text and data mining across the disciplines.