About

Colleen A. Laird is a doctoral candidate in the University of Oregon’s Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. I am currently living in Tokyo as a Monbukagasho Research Scholar associated with Tsukuba University and am writing my dissertation on contemporary female film directors in Japan. My dissertation questions how Japanese women directors construct space in their films through cinematography and visual concepts of place, as well as how the contemporary industry constructs space for women directors through gendered marketing and discourse. It’s all very fancy.

For the most part, I am interested in approaching film from an analysis of paratexts. What this means is that although I dearly love film analysis, I am recently more interested in the texts surrounding films–from theater layouts and marketing gimmicks to the rhetoric of scholarly critique and film histories–than the films themselves. This approach is rooted in the field of reception studies, a collection of ideas that acknowledges that the process of meaning making is done through the act of spectatorship. Paratext analysis takes this idea to the next level, exploring how we create meaning (or more often how “correct” meanings are pushed on us) from the texts surrounding films and how, because we have far more interaction with paratexts than the single central text, our relationship to them is (arguably) more relevant, dynamic, and demanding of critical attention.

I am reachable by email at colleen_laird_at_gmail_dot_com and I encourage missives regarding collaboration, corrections, communication, and cake.
Especially cake.

-Colleen A. Laird