Jaqueline BerndtProfessor
About me
Professor in ‘Japanese Language and Culture’
PhD (Dr. phil.) in Aesthetics/Kunstwissenschaft, Humboldt University Berlin, 1991
Preferred medium of contact: email, not phone.
2019-_Chairperson and main contact for book series "Stockholm Studies in Media Arts Japan” (SMAJ, Stockholm University Press, Open Access)
2021-_managing co-editor for book series “Comics Studies: Aesthetics, Histories, Practices” (deGruyter, Berlin)
2018- _Board member, Center for Global Asia (Faculty of Social Sciences, SU)
2018–2023_Council member, European Association of Japanese Studies (EAJS)
Employment History
Professor in Manga/Comics Theory (tenured), Graduate School of Manga, Kyoto Seika University, Japan (2009-2017)
Associate Professor in Art and Media Studies (tenured), Faculty of Education and Human Sciences, Yokohama National University, Japan (2001-2009)
Associate Professor in Art Sociology (tenured), Department of Social Sciences, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan (1995-2001)
Teaching
I am teaching in English (and Japanese--although not at SU).
VT2025:
JKA935_Queer Asia (freestanding, via Zoom; 2nd period, 7.5 hp)
JKA223/delkurs JA26 “Japanese culture” (not freestanding; 2nd period, 5 hp)
JKA663_Bachelor course (Kandidatkurs) (not freestanding)
To Foreign Students Seeking PhD Supervision:
Unfortunately, I am not allowed to accept PhD students outside of the specifically Swedish framework of contracted positions (here, PhD student is an employment, and openings are rare; a program with entrance exams doesn’t exist).
But if you are enrolled in another university’s PhD program, you are welcome to receive my supervision as an academic intern or guest for one or two semesters (provided that you are able to cover your living expenses).
Research
What? — Visual arts/aesthetic culture in Asia (19th – 21st centuries: graphic arts, filmic media), manga/comics, anime and animation
How? — Media Studies (new formalism and materialism applied to manga and anime); Art Theory/Aesthetics; Museum/Exhibition Studies
Research projects
Publications
A selection from Stockholm University publication database
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The Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime
2024. .
Book (ed)This Companion conjoins manga and anime as distinct while interrelated media forms. Focusing on corporate productions in the Japanese environment, it introduces how manga and anime operate individually and together. In line with this, common characteristics such as visuals, voices, serial narratives, and industrial conditions are addressed in a twofold way, that is, from the respective vantage points of both manga studies and anime studies. A form-conscious approach prevails, which results from the central position ceded to mature readers and viewers, acknowledging their imaginative as well as critical agency. This approach provides analytical tools that can be applied to changing contents and situations, up to and including non-Japanese productions and usages of the two media forms. Ultimately, the Companion offers insights not only into the media forms themselves but also into state-of-the-art manga studies and anime studies.
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Exhibiting Manga, Representing ‘Japan’
2024. Jaqueline Berndt. Japanese Art – Transcultural Perspectives, 543-565
ChapterManga are a global phenomenon that by the 2010s had gained attention beyond the initial subcultural field. Exhibitions leaning on references to “Japan” helped to establish an acceptance among non-readers, first in Japan and later abroad. But once manga had matured as a transnational media, the situation went into reverse: manga came to be employed as a means of promoting “Japan.” Drawing on comics studies, and exhibition research, this chapter examines the relationship between exhibiting manga and representing “Japan” using the example of the world-traveling exhibition “Manga Hokusai Manga: Approaching the Master’s Compendium from the Perspective of Contemporary Comics” (The Japan Foundation, 2016-). While the first section provides a brief survey of manga exhibitions in Japan, the second (and main) section looks at how they facilitate the purpose of representing “Japan.” Attention is drawn to conditions of exhibition-making that tend to go unheeded by critics (budget, availability of exhibits, and internal conflicts). Regarding the “exhibition as narrative”, the analysis focuses on what the show in question “tells,” both verbally and visually, and what it affords. The third and closing section shifts the emphasis from representing “Japan” to representing manga. It considers the target-audiences of manga-as-comics exhibitions and suggests turning the attention from the representation of particular subject matter to spatiality as the point where graphic narratives and exhibition layout meet.
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Kusazōshi as Comic Books? Reading Early Modern Graphic Narratives from a Manga Studies Perspective
2024. Jaqueline Berndt. Graphic Narratives from Early Modern Japan, 530-559
ChapterThis chapter puts conceptualizations of kuzazōshi as “comic books” to the test by subjecting two early modern graphic narratives to a mangaesque reading, that is to say, a reading that treats them as if they were contemporary story-manga. However, this reading does not foreground character types, narrative tropes, visual motifs, or parodic intertextuality, which normally are the subject of investigation by literary scholars; preference is given to embodied reading, to the perceptual rather than cognitive effects of the forms at hand. This includes intermedial considerations, in particular regarding the argument that the storytelling of modern comics is fundamentally informed by cinema. The manga-informed readings foreground two central issues: on the one hand, the perceptual movement of the gaze which connects to page-turns as movements of the hand, and the narrative’s visual flow forward; on the other hand, the representation of characters’ feelings, which in turn may move the reader and lead to empathetic engagement. In conclusion, the contingency of the notion of “manga” comes to the fore, and the conceptualization of kusazōshi as “comic books” appears as a matter of degree, depending on the considered historical periods, genres, and works of manga, and also the aesthetic aspects that are highlighted. Rendered in still, mute, and monochrome fragmented drawings, both kusazōshi and (print-based) story-manga afford an agency to their readers, that differs from both classic live-action film and recent (vertical-scroll) webtoons. To trace this agency, it is vital to consider the perceptual, sensory, and cognitive effects of the material forms at hand, and their embodied reading.
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Manga: an affective form of comics
2023. Jaqueline Berndt. The Cambridge Companion to Comics, 82-101
ChapterTaking the narrow notion of manga outside of Japan as its starting point, this chapter refrains from introducing the diversity of comics in Japan in favor of a transculturally open approach. From a form-conscious perspective, it conceptualizes manga as a highly affective type of comics that share characteristics with non-Japanese comics far beyond the “manga” label. Following a brief historical survey of what “manga” has meant in English since the 1980s, the device of affective eyes takes center stage. Graphic narratives by Osamu Tezuka, Keiji Nakazawa, Keiko Takemiya, and Jirō Taniguchi serve as examples for how extreme close-ups of eyes have operated across periods and genres, namely, not only as representations of interiority or ethnicity, but also as material signposts and guides of visual perception: eyes draw attention, get readers involved prior to critical interpretation, establish intimacy with characters, provide a node for a page’s visual fragments, help to obscure the divide between inside and outside, subject and object, self and other. Moving gingerly into an ocular history of manga as an affective form of comics, the chapter seeks to turn away from essentialist, as well as culturalist, definitions of what manga is in favor of how it operates.
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Collapsing Boundaries
2021. Jaqueline Berndt. Beyond MAUS, 169-192
ChapterTaking the investigation of comics and the Holocaust beyond MAUS implies a twofold difference in the case of Japan, where Spiegelman’s work has been available in translation since the early 1990s. First, Japan appears to be a historically detached site with regards to the Holocaust and its memory, and precisely this distance has facilitated the linkage of the Jewish genocide to discourses of national self-victimization. Second, a manga equivalent to MAUS, the epitome of the individually authored, “socially aspirational” graphic novel, is difficult to find. In the main, manga is (gendered) genre fiction and as such abundant in tropes, giving preference to performative fabrications over realist representation, and, in recent years, to connective over collective memory. Depending on situation and context (and effective beyond Japan and manga), tropes hold the potential to involve readers who regard themselves as socio-politically uninvolved. This is demonstrated on the example of the fictionalized parts of the “Anne Frank” issue in the weekly-manga series Great Persons, rendered in overcute moe style by artist TNSK (2015); and Machiko Kyo’s 2-volume Anne-Frank fantasy “ANoNE” (serialized in the women’s manga magazine Elegance Eve, 2011–2013). The focus is on entertaining commercial fiction, leaving aside non-fiction comics productions of the educational kind.
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Deviating from “Art”
2020. Jaqueline Berndt. Comic Art in Museums, 180-193
Chapter
Show all publications by Jaqueline Berndt at Stockholm University
Japanese studies, visual culture, media aesthetics (manga/comics studies, anime studies, modern art)