Rate My Professor Christine Marran

Christine Marran is Professor and Chair of the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Professor of Japanese Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. She earned her Ph.D. in Modern Japanese Literature from the University of Washington. Marran's research examines the role of culture in environmental thinking through a new materialist lens applied to Japanese literature, cinema, and visual culture. Her specialties include Japanese popular culture from the 1870s to the present, Japanese literature and film, early Meiji writing such as newspapers and gesaku literature, gender, sexuality, and identity in print and film culture, ethics and the animal, Japanese and Asian film, ecocriticism, biopolitics, toxicity, new materialisms, multispecies ethnography, and animal studies. She teaches courses on ecocriticism, literary writing, and cinema studies.

Marran authored two books with the University of Minnesota Press: Poison Woman: Figuring the Transgressive Woman in Modern Japanese Literature (2007), which investigates the poison woman icon's influence on perceptions of women's sexuality from its origins in 1870s newspapers, and Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic Age (2017), which critiques cultural exceptionalism in environmental discourse via concepts like the biotrope, ethnic environmentalism, and obligatory storytelling. Her publications feature chapters in Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power, Ishimure Michiko’s Writing in Ecocritical Perspective, Mechademia, Eco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema, Teaching Postwar Japanese Fiction (MLA), and Digital Animalities: Mediating Life in an Age of Planetary Domestication, along with articles such as “Two Archipelagos, One Planet” in Interdisciplinary Studies on Literature and the Environment. She has held fellowships including the Japan Foundation (2014–2015), Faculty Fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities (2008–2009), and multiple Institute for Advanced Study Residential Fellowships at the University of Minnesota (2011, 2006; 2024–2025 for “Documenting Environmental Displacement and Trans-Pacific Immigration with Creative Nonfiction as Method,” supporting her book Tsugi on a Fukushima sake-brewing family). Additional honors include Imagine Fund Research Grants (2014, 2011), Single Semester Leave (2014), and International Travel Grant (2015). Marran is completing First Person Animal on animal figures in Asian decolonial cinema and literature, translated a brewer’s diary, served as a Loft Literary Center writing fellow, and maintains a Substack on Japanese culture and environmental issues.