Christine Marran

Dr. Christine L. Marran, Professor of Japanese Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota, is the author of two books with University of Minnesota Press and dozens of journal articles and book chapters on Japanese culture and the environment. She is dedicated to thinking about the role of culture on environments. Her second book, published with the University of Minnesota Press, Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic Age illustrates why environmental thinking often requires a critique of culture. Introducing her concepts of the “biotrope,” "ethnic environmentalism," and “obligatory storytelling,” Marran shows how cultural ideas, which mostly work at a human-scale usually toward human interest, can impede our ability to speak about the more-than-human world. Her new materialist approach illustrates how ecocriticism can account for things smaller and greater than a selective humanist “we” only if it takes a critical position on cultural exceptionalism. 

Marran has written many articles on environmental issues in literary and visual culture including her most recent "Two Archipelagos, One Planet" in the journal Interdisciplinary Studies on Literature and the Environment," and “Temporality and Landscapes of Reclamation: Johnny Depp Goes to Minamata” in Eco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema, and “First Person Animal Voices in Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear” in Teaching Postwar Japanese Fiction (MLA). Marran’s earlier book, Poison Woman: Figuring the Transgressive Woman in Modern Japanese Literature, investigates the powerful icon of “poison woman” and its shifting meanings within medicine and popular culture, and its influence on defining women’s sexuality and place from the pop cultural figure's inception in serialized newspapers of the 1870s. 

She is also finishing a book called “First Person Animal” on the roles of animal figures in Asian decolonial cinema and literature to reconsider how we think about subjectivity. This project grew out of chapter on trap cameras by Marran, "You Turn to the Camera and I Smile" in the new book edited by Jody Berland and Thomas Lamarre, Digital Animalities: Mediating Life in an Age of Planetary Domestication (UMP).

In Fall 2024, she was a Fellow in the University of Minnesota's Institute for Advanced Study at UMN working on a creative nonfiction book telling the story of a multigenerational sake-brewing family forced to emigrate to the U.S. after radiation fallout in Fukushima. That project began as her translation of the brewer's diary published here. She continued this work as a writing fellow in the Loft Literary Center's Creative Non-Fiction course led by author Sun Yung Shin for one year and presents a public reading on January 6, 2026 at 7:00 pm CST. (Link to be provided).

Please join Marran at her new Substack on Japanese culture and environmental issues, “One Archipelago, One Planet.”