Kirsten Seuffert

Kirsten Seuffert earned her PhD from the University of Southern California’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in 2024 with a certificate in Visual Studies as well as a master’s degree from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Her main fields of research are cinema, media, and visual culture in postwar and contemporary Japan and gender and sexuality studies, though her interests extend to popular culture, performance, and literature within the Japanese and transnational/transpacific contexts and other aspects of embodiment such as disability, aging/wellness, affect, and reception. Before joining Yale, Kirsten was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Center for Japanese Studies, where she taught courses on postwar/contemporary visual culture in Japan and affect and non-normative lifestyles as represented in and constructed through film. She is currently working on a manuscript that explores live action cinema and visual media in Japan from the later 1970s through the 1980s through the lenses of gender, authorship, and subcultures. Her work on women’s professional wrestling in Japan and the media mix was published in Mechademia (Winter 2023), and her latest article on women’s participation in punk-related film and other media in 1970s-1980s Japan will appear in the August 2025 issue of The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Through her teaching, Kirsten encourages deep engagement with archives—in particular unusual, undervalued, and unexpected ones—and stresses the importance of developing strong critical writing skills.