Team

Associate Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at Penn State University, Jonathan E. Abel has taught Japanese film for over twenty years, publishing scholarship on silent films from the 1920s, pink films from the 1960s, and monster films from the 1970s. His 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.

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. His current research interests include the uses of topology in twentieth 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 how memories of the popular icon Tora-san are deployed within the contemporary continuation of the "It's Tough Being a Man" film series to evoke nostalgia.

CineMAP Japan 2024 Team
Dave McLaughlin, MGIS, 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 connects the world of university research to the world at large. He is a 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 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 Associate Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at Boston University. She specializes in twentieth century Japanese literature and history and has worked extensively on 1920s and '30s women's print culture, image and text in literature of the 1930s–50s, and gender and sexuality in modern literature and culture. She is author of Turning Pages (2006) and is writing a biography of Yoshiya Nobuko, whose short story "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 the use of representations of women and femininity in popular discourses about film realism. Her essays have appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Screen, Feminist Media Histories; positions: asia critique; and various edited collections. Her current project concerns women's computer-facing work and information society discourse in Japan in the 1960s–80s.

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. Her recent work, including the digital mapping archive project Mapping Tokyo Olympics 3.0: The Politics of Demolition and Displacement, has focused on visualizing and archiving spatial practices of artistic and social collectives in Tokyo. She collaborates on the Awa Money/Our Money: Currency, Community, and Sustainability in Rural Japan gaming project.

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, literary writing, and cinema. Marran's work 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, using a new materialist approach to show how ecocriticism can account for things smaller and greater than a selective humanist "we."

CineMAP Symposium, May 2024
Kevin J. McKiernan is a PhD candidate in the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department at the University of Minnesota. His research analyzes the theoretical and stylistic connections between Japanese and Brazilian cinemas and shows their relevance for global 1960s media and political discourse. His article, "Present perfect cinema and the implicated subject: The utilization of photographs in Ōshima Nagisa's Diary of Yunbogi," is forthcoming from the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema.

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. 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 of multiple volumes and 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 interests include experimental documentaries, contents tourism and nature, and interfaces of cartography and urban space. She has published a book on writer Nakagami Kenji (Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity, 2011), as well as essays on pink cinema, 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.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2024–2025
Jiaxin Yan is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Penn State University. She works on modern and contemporary Japanese literature and culture, with particular interests in postcolonial studies and transnational feminisms. Her dissertation analyzes the embodied experiences of Cold War politics in the literary productions of Okinawan, Taiwanese, and Zainichi Korean writers. Her articles are forthcoming in The Journal of Japanese Studies and Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature.

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 A. Boittin is the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global History at UNC Chapel Hill. She is the author of Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris (University of Nebraska Press, 2010), Undesirable: Passionate Mobility and Women’s Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919–1952 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), and several articles. 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 Penn 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" and numerous 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 holds MSLS (Information and Library Science, Clarion University), Master of Education (Lifelong Learning and Adult Education, Penn State), and Master of Science (Geography, Michigan State University) degrees.

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 a career in music libraries and archives. In his spare time, he is a freelance composer for independent video games.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2020–2022
Dr. Jennifer Isasi is Assistant Research Professor of Digital Scholarship and the Director of the Digital Liberal Arts Research Initiative, a research support hub for articulating and integrating digital research in projects in the humanities and social sciences, at Penn State University. She is also Managing Editor of the open access journal Programming Historian en español, for which she collaborates on 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 2014–2016
Kendra McDuffie earned a Ph.D. at Penn 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 twentieth-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 2014–2016
Elizabeth Tuttle 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. Dr. Tuttle's research has been supported by the Millstone Research Fellowship, the Legacies of the Enlightenment Research Fellowship, and the Chateaubriand Fellowship. She teaches classes on French political activism, literary and filmic representations of social class, and French Indochina.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2014–2016
Dr. Carl Cornell is Lecturer in French Studies and Landscape Studies at Smith College. He conducts research on how cities manage the transition from industrialization to sustainability. His current project, Recycling Industry: The Livable French City Today, examines how five cities across continental France are using cultural initiatives to recycle their former industrial spaces and generate a dynamic new sense of place. His research on deindustrialization informed an article on the work of André Gide and Didier van Cauwelaert that appeared in The French Review in 2021.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2014–2016
Andrew Jones is Assistant Professor French at Ursinus College. 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.His current research project explores testimony through the lens of cinematic storytelling in the wake of extreme human catastrophes including the Holocaust, Colonialism, and the Gulag.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2014–2016
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 English, Yiddish, and Japanese literary modernisms.

CineMAP Team Collaborators 2014–2016
Dr Heather Froehlich is Digital Scholarship Specialist at the University of Arizona Libraries; she was 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.