PhD 2020
Dissertation: “Staging the Bright Life: White-Collar Cinema in Japan’s Era of High Economic Growth (1954-1971)”
Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultures, Indiana University
Hannah Airriess is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. Airriess specializes in Japanese film and media, with a specific focus on media’s articulation of shifting economic structures and ideas of nation across mid 20thcentury East Asia. She is currently working on a book manuscript concerning the figure of the salaryman, or male white-collar worker, staged across mass media in Japan’s era of high economic growth (1954-1971). Using a transmedial approach that draws together studio film with archival material such as serialized fiction, advertising, popular social science texts and management literature, she argues that the salaryman emerged as the dominant figure through which political and cultural transformations concerning labor, class, gender, and national identity were mediated in postwar Japan. Her research interests also include recession-era media cultures, travel film, and media theory.
