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-Convener of the Environmental Humanities Initiative at the University of Minnesota. 

Through a new materialist approach, Marran’s work addresses 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 animal and plant life, archipelagoes and climate in narrative and moving images, Marran offers strategies for reading and interpreting more-than-human elements in the work of activist-writers and filmmakers in the Japanese archipelago. Selected works include Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic Age, “Planetarity” in boundary 2; “Literature Without Us,” in Ishimure Michiko’s Writing in Ecocritical Perspective: Between Sea and Sky; “Animal Stranger in a Tokyo Canal” in Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power and other works. 

At Yale, Professor Marran will continue her work in the environmental humanities. She will dig into the new Noriaki Tsuchimoto Papers archive at Yale to expand her work on the prolific documentarian’s films, paying particular attention to the role of photography, seas, and toxins in his films; she will complete an essay on the conservationist technology of trap cameras; and she will continue her work on a longer project of translation and critique, “Fukushima Diaries.”