Senior Research Associate
Sharalyn Orbaugh
Sharalyn Orbaugh is Professor of Asian Studies and Women's & Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is a specialist in modern Japanese narrative and visual culture, including popular culture media such as manga and anime. Recent publications include Japanese Fiction of the Allied Occupation: Vision, Embodiment, Identity (Brill, 2007), Raced Bodies and the Public Sphere in Ichikawa Kon's film Tokyo Olympiad (2007), and Emotional Infectivity: The Japanese Cyborg and the Limits of the Human (2008).
During her year as a Senior Research Associate at the Sainsbury Institute, she plans to complete two in-progress research projects. The first concerns kamishibai, a performance art form popular from 1930 to the early 1970s. The direct ancestor of serialized manga and anime, kamishibai was a street theater for children that combined picture, script, and performance. During the war, kamishibai was also used extensively as a propaganda tool, and not just for children.
Her research project begins by addressing the characteristics of kamishibai as a medium, with a particular focus on the interplay between word and image. Other aspects of the research include a consideration of kamishibai?s role in the construction of urban space in the 1930s and 1950s, its role in the propaganda machine during the Fifteen Year War, and the uses made of kamishibai by SCAP during the Allied Occupation, 1945-1952.
The second book-length project is The Japanese Cyborg and the Limits of the Human, which explores the multitude of popular culture products in Japan, from 1850 to the present, that feature cyborgs (organic-machinic hybrids) or other technologically-produced sentient beings. One particular focus is the figure of the cyborg in manga and anime, including the ramifications of the ways cyborgs
are depicted visually.