Raechel Dumas

Associate Professor
Office: AL 561
Email: [email protected]

Raechel Dumas (Ph.D. in Japanese, University of Colorado at Boulder) is a specialist in modern Japan, with emphasis in the histories of literature and visual culture. Her research focuses on contemporary Japanese fiction, film, television, and video games, and especially the gender and sexual politics of dark genres including horror, crime fiction, and science fiction. Her other interests include comparative horror studies; global trauma narratives; the gender politics of true crime media; science and literature; and feminist, psychoanaytic, and affect theories.

Dr. Dumas is author of The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), which explores the role of female monsters in Japanese fiction, manga, film, and video games produced from the 1980s through the new millennium. With attention to its diverse iterations and deep ambivalence, she argues that this enduring trope indexes patriarchal anxieties centered on shifting configurations of subjectivity and nationhood while also elaborating novel possibilities for identity negotiation and social formation in a period marked by dramatic socio-cultural change.

Articles by Dr. Dumas have appeared in Journal of Popular Culture, Extrapolation, Science Fiction Studies, Supernatural Studies, Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and South Atlantic Review. She is presently working on her second book, which examines how English-language television series including Twin Peaks, Stranger Things, Westworld, and Riverdale navigate the paradox of traumatic representation to engage both historic and quotidian violence.