Graduate Student, Comparative Literature
About
I suffer from the eternal curse of the dilettante. My perennial lack of focus means I have been interested in just about everything, including things I have no aptitude for, like physics. Accordingly, I spent five lingering years as an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico, finally deciding almost by default to major in English literature, and, due to a couple great professors, minor in Japanese. And it is in the latter, rather than the former, that I finally found my genuine abiding interests. Japanese language, aesthetics, and film have actually been interests of mine since I was around 13 years old, but as an undergraduate I was also became intrigued by its gastronomic traditions, literature, and manga/anime and their attendant fan cultures.
This fall I'll be entering the University of Georgia's graduate program in Comparative Literature. My main research interests at this point are science fiction, particularly Japanese (but I am ultimately concerned with sf as a global phenomenon), horror and exploitation film, cinematic violence, and apocalyptic/utopian narratives across literary traditions. I am also interested in manga and anime fan cultures in the United States and Japan, particularly phenomena such as doujinshi, internet fan fiction, and yaoi.
