Christine Marran

Christine Marran specializes in the fields of environmental humanities, critical theory, and gender studies. She is Professor of Japanese Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Co-Founder of the Environmental Humanities Initiative at the University of Minnesota. In her work, Marran 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. In her analysis of narrative and moving images, Marran offers strategies for interpreting the work of activist-writers and filmmakers in the Japanese archipelago. Her ecocritical publications include Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic Age (University of Minnesota Press); “Planetarity” in boundary 2; “Literature Without Us,” in Ishimure Michiko’s Writing in Ecocritical Perspective: Between Sea and Sky (Lexington Books); “First-Person Animal Voices in Tawada Yōko’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear,” in Teaching Postwar Japanese Fiction (MLA); “Animal Stranger in a Tokyo Canal” in Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power (U Hawaii), among other works. She is currently working on a book project on animals and perspective in media and literature and thanks the Yale MacMillan Center for its support while working on this project.