Professor Thomas LaMarre...
is a professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and associate in Communications Studies at McGill University. He has written three books on the history of media and material culture in Japan. The first, Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription, centres on the formation of inter-imperial media networks linking 9th century Japan to kingdoms in Korea and China, showing how calligraphic styles and poetic exchanges served to ground a cosmopolitical order. The second, Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichir? on Cinema and Oriental Aesthetics, looks at how cinema in 1910s and 1920s Japan radically transformed urban experiences of space and time, resulting in a new image of world and world history wherein Japan was reconfigured as the Oriental subject and object of empire. The third, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, explores how animation technologies spurred the formation of distinctive lineages of technological thought in Japan of the 1980s and 1990s. With funding from SSHRC, he is currently finishing a book entitled Otaku Movement: Capitalism and Fan Media (under contract with MIT) that explores fan activities, transformations in labour, and cultural activism in contemporary Japan. He is a participant in a CFI grant to construct at Moving Image Research Laboratory.