Susan J. Napier
Napier in 2008
Occupation	Professor, anime critic
Nationality	American
Subject	Japanese literature
Notable works	Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke

Susan Jolliffe Napier (born October 11, 1955) is a professor of the Japanese program at Tufts University. She was formerly the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin. She also worked as a visiting professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University,^[1] and in cinema and media studies at University of Pennsylvania. Napier is an anime and manga critic.

Biography

Napier is the daughter of historian Reginald Phelps, a historian and educational administrator, and Julia Sears Phelps, both Harvard academics. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts.^[2] Her neighbors included John Kenneth Galbraith, Julia Child, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. She obtained her A.B., A.M., and PhD degrees from Harvard University.^[3]

In 1991 Napier published Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo. Her second book, The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity, followed in 1996.^[3]

Napier first became interested in anime and manga when a student showed her a copy of Akira. Napier then saw the film, which led to the creation of her third book, Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation,^[1][4] which was revised in 2005.^[5] Napier's From Impressionism To Anime: Japan As Fantasy And Fan Cult In The Western Imagination was published in 2007, which discusses anime fandom in greater depth.^[6][7]

Works

• Napier, Susan J. (1996). The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity. London: Routledge. p. 272. ISBN 978-0-415-12458-4.
• Napier, Susan J (1998). "Vampires, Psychic Girls, Flying Women and Sailor Scouts". In Martinez, Dolores P (ed.). The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Culture. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-63128-9.
• Napier, Susan J. (2001). "Confronting Master Narratives: History As Vision in Miyazaki Hayao's Cinema of De-assurance". Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique. 9 (2): 467–493. doi:10.1215/10679847-9-2-467. S2CID 144130648.
• Napier, Susan J. (March 11, 2008). From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 272. ISBN 978-1-4039-6214-0.
• Napier, Susan J (2006). Meet Me on the Other Side: Strategies of Otherness in Modern Japanese literature. London: Routledge. pp. 38–55. ISBN 978-0-415-36185-9.
• Napier, Susan J. (2006). "'Excuse Me, Who Are You?': Performance, the Gaze, and the Female in the Works of Kon Satoshi". In Brown, Steven T (ed.). Cinema Anime: Critical Engagements with Japanese Animation. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-4039-8308-4.
• Napier, Susan J. (2005). Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle: Experiencing Japanese Animation. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 384. ISBN 978-1-4039-7052-7.
• Napier, Susan J. (2007). "When the Machine Stops: Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments: Lain". Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime. University of Minnesota Press. p. 269. ISBN 978-0-8166-4973-0.
• Napier, Susan J. (2018). Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art. Yale University Press. p. 344. ISBN 978-0-300-22685-0.