Deanna T. Nardy
About
Deanna T. Nardy (Ph.D., Columbia University) is a specialist in modern Japanese literature and media. Her current work centers the creative practices of Japanese translators, manga artists, and photographers in the postwar era. She is particularly interested in how their interactions with the literary and literal bodies of African Americans precipitated the exploration of new ways of being, and the medium-specific counter-aesthetic practices therein.
Prior to joining the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in 2026, Nardy was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. She earned her M.A. from Kyoto University in 2018, and her B.A. from Columbia University in 2015.
Modern Japanese literature, media studies, Afro-Asian studies
Book Chapters
- “Translating Blackness: Framing ‘Black Literature’ in Postwar Japan,” in Global Japanese History and Culture: De-Isolating Japan from Past to Present (Routledge, 2026) pp. 31-35.
- “Tarzan and Japan: Racial Portraits of a Nation in Boy Kenya,” in Japanese Visual Media: Politicizing the Screen, eds. Jennifer Coates and Eyal Ben-Ari (Routledge, 2021) pp. 71-94.
Articles
- 視線を交わすことへの希望と、その否定がもたらす暴力－「黒い傷 痕の男」について (The Desire for a Reciprocal Gaze and the Violence Wrought by its Denial: On Kuroi Kizuato no Otoko), Kashihon manga-shi kenkyū vol. 8 (2023): 112-135.
- Co-authored with Jennifer Coates and Jamie Coates, “Back to the Future: Imaginaries of Africa on East Asian Screens,” Open Screens 4, no. 1 (2021): 1-10.
- 松本清張の『黒地の絵』と占領期の日本人のアフリカ系アメリカ兵観 (Matsumoto Seichō’s ‘Kuroji no e’ and Views of African-American Soldiers in Occupied Japan), In Ajia gendai joshi-shi, vol. 13 (2019): 28-42.
Afro-Asian Encounters in Japanese Literature and Media
Japanese Manga