Jaclyn Zhou Awarded Center for Japanese Studies Fellowship
Congratulations, Jaclyn Zhou, on being awarded a Center for Japanese Studies Fellowship!
The award will help fund Jaclyn's dissertation research in Japan. Jaclyn is investigating the visual and material culture of anime fan tourism: a variety of activities undertaken by Japanese and international anime fans whose touristic practices are shaped by their attachments to certain anime texts, characters, and settings. Her project asks how the transnational circulation of Japanese media and subsequent media-induced leisure travel have become sites for the affective, embodied, and place-based negotiation with complex histories of race, migration, imperialism, war, and gender in Japan and the Transpacific. By attending to the affective hermeneutics of fandom – “a set of ways of gaining knowledge through feeling” (Wilson 2016) – the project focuses on how race and nation in particular become felt and sensible through the ostensibly non-political activities of fan tourists.