Andrea Horbinski Awarded Koo Fellowship
New Media DE Andrea Horbinski has been awarded a Dr. C.F. Koo and Cecilia Koo Chair Fellowship for Outstanding Graduate Students in East Asian Studies for 2014.
The Dr. C.F. Koo and Cecilia Koo Chair endowment was established in 2008 at the University of California, Berkeley. The Dr. C.F. Koo and Cecilia Koo Fellowships in East Asian Studies have been established at Berkeley's Institute of East Asian Studies to honor outstanding graduate students in East Asian studies, as demonstrated by their academic record and by the submission of an original research paper. Horbinski, whose dissertation focuses on the history of manga from 1912-2012, submitted an unpublished translation of sections of a 1764 educational text for women, with commentary. "I am strongly interested in women’s history and in media history, and translating the Onna teikin gosho bunko seemed like a worthy way to unite those two interests in an era before the 1970s," Horbinski writes. "The third chapter of my dissertation, a history of manga (Japanese comics), focuses on that era, when girls and women reading and writing manga both officially and unofficially reshaped the medium with global consequences for its popularity; there are deep connections between the 'material girls' of eighteenth century Edo and Kyoto and the female readers and writers of comics in Japan more than two centuries later."