Thomas Lamarre, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Please note: Thomas has left the "Asian & Middle Eastern Studies" group at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.

My research centers on the history of media, thought, and material culture, with projects ranging from the communication networks of 9^th century Japan (Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription, 2000), to silent cinema and the global imaginary (Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirô on Cinema and Oriental Aesthetics, 2005), animation technologies (The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, 2009) and on television and new media (The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media, 2018). Current projects include research on animation that addresses the use of animals in the formation of media networks associated with colonialism and extraterritorial empire, and the consequent politics of animism and speciesism.

I have also edited volumes on cinema and animation, on the impact of modernity in East Asia, on pre-emptive war, and, as Associate Editor of Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts, a number of volumes on manga, anime, and fan cultures, among them Circuits of Desire (2007), The Limits of the Human (2008), War/Time (2009), Fanthropologies (2010), User Enhancement (2011), Lines of Sight (2012), and Tezuka’s Manga Life (2013). Current editorial work includes volumes on Chinese animation as well as risk, media, and animality. 

I am also interested in translation. My major translations from Japanese and French include: Kawamata Chiaki’s SF novel Death Sentences; Muriel Combes’s Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual; and David Lapoujade’s William James: Pragmatism and Empiricsm (Duke, 2020) I am co-editor with Takayuki Tatsumi of a book series with the University of Minnesota Press entitled “Parallel Futures,” which centers on translations of Japanese speculative fiction.

As James McGill Professor Emeritus of Japanese Media Studies at McGill University, I serve as a co-director of the Moving Image Research Laboratory, funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and partnered by local research initiatives such as Immediations, Hexagram, and Artemis. 

Teaching and Research Interests: Media History and Theory; Animation and New Media; Critical Race Studies; Transnational Television; Animal Studies; Science and Technology Studies; Japanese and Continental Philosophy; Ritual Theory and Practice; Early and Medieval Japanese Culture

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