Deborah Shamoon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Japanese Studies. She was born and raised in the United States, and completed her MA at the University of Washington, Seattle in 1999 and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, both in modern Japanese literature. Her areas of expertise are Japanese literature, film and popular culture, particularly manga (comics) and animation. She received a Monbusho grant for MA research at Ritsumeikan in 1997, a Japan Foundation Grant for research at Waseda University in 2003 and 2009, and a Research Mobility Grant at Meiji University in 2020. Dr. Shamoon's research focuses on representations of girls and young women in Japanese media (film, anime, manga, novels, magazines) from the 1920s to the present day. Her book, Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls' Culture in Japan (University of Hawai'i Press, 2012) is a cultural history of shojo manga (girls' romance comics).
modern Japanese literature, film and popular culture; manga and anime; shojo bunka (girls' culture); gender studies and media studies; pedagogy of teaching popular culture
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