Susan J. Napier

Dr. Susan Jolliffe Napier is Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin, and a visiting professor at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Napier has since relocated to Tufts University. Napier is also an anime and manga critic.

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.

Napier first became interested in manga when a student showed her a copy of Akira. Napier then saw the film, which lead to the creation of her third book, Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, which was revised in 2005. 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.