Collegiate Affiliation
Professor,
Asian & Middle Eastern Studies

Christine (Christy) Marran is Professor of Japanese Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is currently a Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Study at UMN writing a creative nonfiction book telling the multigenerational story of a sake brewing family forced to emigrate to the U.S. after radiation fallout in Fukushima. She is also finishing a book called “First Person Animal” on the roles of animal figures in Asian decolonial cinema and literature and expands on arguments made in her book Ecology Without Culture:Aesthetics for a Toxic Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), which illustrates why environmental thinking requires a critique of culture. Introducing her concepts of the “biotrope,” "ethnic environmentalism," and “obligatory storytelling,” Marran shows how cultural ideas, which work at a humanistic 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 “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 its inception in the 1870s. 

Educational Background & Specialties
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Educational Background

  • Ph. D.: Modern Japanese Literature, University of Washington

Specialties

  • Modern Japanese literature
  • Gender and sexuality in print and film culture
  • Ecocriticism
  • Japanese and Asian film