Marcos Centeno-Martin is associate professor at the University of Valencia specialised in Film and Japanese Studies. Previously, Centeno worked as lecturer in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, where served as the Japanese Studies Programme director. Before that, Centeno had also been lecturer for the Department of Japan and Korea at SOAS, University of London where he coordinated the MA Global Cinemas and the Transcultural.  He has recently been research associate at the Nissan Institute for Japanese Studies, the University of Oxford, on a grant funded by the Spansih Ministry of Sciences, Council on East Asian Studies grant holder at Yale University and guest lecturer at the Centre for Japanese Studies, Nanzan University. His main research interests revolve around Japanese documentary film, transculturality, memory and visual representation of the Ainu people. Centeno has coordinated projects on Japanese documentary film, female director Haneda Sumiko and Japanese Transnational Cinema which have been funded by British, Japanese and Spanish institutions such as Sasakawa, Daiwa, Japan Foundation, Japanese Ministry of Education and Spanish Ministry of Sciences. Centeno is board member for the AEJE (Asociación de Estudios Japoneses en España), editorial board member for Mirai. Revista Estudios Japoneses, and was convenor for the EAJS (the European Association for Japanese Studies) Visual Arts section (2019-2023). He has been jury member for prizes such as ICAS/SEPHIS prize for the best books on Asian Studies in Spanish and Portuguese, Ivan Morris Memorial Prize on Japanese Studies (awarded by the British Association for Japanese Studies) and Cambridge Watersprite Film Fesitval.

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Raúl Fortes-Guerrero received his BA in Audiovisual Communication, his BA in History of Art with Special Distinction, and his PhD Cum Laude and International Doctor Mention in History of Art from the Universitat de València (University of Valencia), where he has developed most of his career as a lecturer and researcher. He was granted up to four fellowships, thanks to which he could stay at Waseda University (Tokyo), Birkbeck College – University of London, and the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). He is a member of the European Association for Japanese Studies (EAJS) and the Japanese poetry society Chikuhaku-kai, in whose renowned literary magazine Kokoro no Hana he gets his tanka poems published monthly. Besides his literary works (poems awarded at international contests and published in collaborative books as well as in Spanish and foreign poetry anthologies), he is the author of many scientific articles, book chapters, and books, including a monograph on Hayao Miyazaki (Hayao Miyazaki, Akal, 2019) and a film guide for his movie Spirited Away (“El viaje de Chihiro”. Hayao Miyazaki (2001), Nau Llibres/Octaedro, 2011). In fact, the oeuvre of Hayao Miyazaki is one of his two main fields of specialization together with the influence of Japanese performing arts on Japanese cinema, as shown not only by his publications, but also by his more than forty papers in national and international scientific conferences and symposiums organized by academic institutions such as Goethe University Frankfurt, University of Warsaw, and Salford University. Currently, he combines his job as a teacher of Japanese language and culture at the Universitat de València with his task as coordinator of the Asia and Oceania Committees at the International Observatory of Intangible Culture and Global Village of this academic institution. To this can be added his work as a member of scientific committees for congresses and scientific journals.

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María Amparo Montaner Montava is a professor in the area of ​​General Linguistics at the University of Valencia and coordinator of the East Asian Studies area at this same University. She directed and coordinated the area in the first ten years of its existence. She has collaborated with several universities and participated in numerous conferences, both in the area of ​​Linguistics and in the area of ​​East Asian Studies, with special dedication to issues of Spanish-Japanese contrastive Linguistics. In addition, she has received scholarships from national and foreign organizations and has carried out research and teaching stays at various universities in Europe, Asia and America, such as Salamanca (Center for Spanish-Japanese Studies), University of California in Berkeley, Santa Barbara or UVA (USA), Mainz and Leipzig (Germany), Aarhus (Denmark), Waseda (Japan), Guadalajara (Mexico), etc. She has published four books and dozens of articles and chapters on theoretical linguistics and on Japanese-Spanish contrastive Linguistics and the linguistic typology of East Asian languages ​​and the Japanese language. In this last field, she has published two monographs and numerous articles and book chapters in publishers such as Tirant lo Blanch (2017, 2019) or Dickynson (2022), among others, or magazines, such as Rilce (2014), Pragmalingüística (2022), Hikma (2022), LynX (2022), etc.

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Antonio Blat's research interests revolve around cultural interaction between Europe and East Asia. He developed this topic throughout his one-year scholarship at Waseda University, his master's degree on late modern and contemporary China nad Japan (UOC) and as a member of the research group GEINTEA (group fo study: Europe-Asia interactions) at the UCM. He has published several articles about Spanish diplomacy and became a member of the historian committee for the celebrations of the 400 years of Japan-Spain relations by the Japanese Embassy in Madrid. For his PHD thesis on late modern history (UV), he embraced a transnational perspective, linking  the study of diplomatic  and cultural interactions to global biographies. Blat undertook this approach during his fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia (Tokyo University), his participation in a research project about the narration of the self and the coordination of a panel about Asia and the global perspective. He has teaching experience at Universitat de València (UV), Universidad de Salamanca (USAL), Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR) and Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM).

Jordi Tordera is a distinguished linguist, translator, and educator with a career that spans continents and languages.Jordi earned his B.A. in English in 1999 at the University of Valencia and completed an M.A. in Japanese Linguistics in 2008 at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies in Japan. In 2010, he achieved his Ph.D.at the University of Valencia, with a dissertation comparing Eastern and Western literary styles across English, Japanese, and Spanish. Tordera held at positions at the University of Valencia, Florida Universitaria, and the Valencian International University and at Japanese universities such as Kansai Gaidai and Himeji Dokkyo. Beyond academia, Jordi was part of Lladró Japan’s Tokyo branch, Coordinator for International Relations with the JET Programme, an interpreter, notably for the Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe and translator of Japanese literary classics, such as Vida de un idiota y otras confesiones by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and La vida de Budori Gusko by Kenji Miyazawa. His research delves into language teaching, translation studies, and cross-cultural communication, with numerous publications and presentations at international conferences.  

María R. Ferrer holds a PhD in Translation and works as an audiovisual translator, editor and researcher. She graduated in Translation and Interpreting from Universitat Jaume I in 1998, although her professional career had already begun in 1996 with her first literary commissions: Sandman: Book of Dreams and, shortly afterwards, Good Omens. Following her study period at Tokyo Daigaku (Japan), she began translating manga and entered the field of audiovisual translation by subtitling, from Japanese into Spanish, the Mikio Naruse retrospective for that year’s Donosti Festival, which included titles such as Magokoro, Tanoshikikana Jinsei and Yottsu no koi no monogatari. Her anime translation portfolio later expanded with series such as Fushigi Yuugi, Karekano, Evangelion and Captain Tsubasa; animated feature films including the HV edition of Akira; and live-action productions such as Onmyouji and Otogirisou. In 2008 she trained as a dubbing actress in Barcelona and adapted numerous fiction series, including The Mentalist, The Middle, The 100, Blindspot, A Series of Unfortunate Events and Search Party. Her manga translations include Akira, Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, xxxHolic, Azumanga Daioh, Yotsubato! and many other titles. She launched the online training platform Translator Training Lab in 2010 and founded Taketombo Books in 2012, a publishing house devoted to the transcultural order of the world. In 2014 the Embassy of Japan recognised its contribution to the promotion of Japanese culture. After completing her PhD in 2016, she began her academic career, combining university teaching with translation, editing and voice work. She taught French language and French–Spanish translation at Universitat Jaume I and the Universitat de València before joining the faculty of Universidad Europea de Valencia (UEV) in 2018, where she is currently Senior Lecturer. She teaches Direct Translation, Audiovisual Translation and Professional Editing; directs the Master’s Degree in Audiovisual Translation; and coordinates the research group TRADULEMA, dedicated to translation, languages and media in intercultural digital society.

Alberto Porta-Pérez holds a PhD in Communication Sciences from Universitat Jaume I, where he teaches in the Bachelor’s Degree in Audiovisual Communication and in the Bachelor’s Degree in Video Game Design and Development. He is also an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Valencia, where he contributes to the Master’s Degree in Japanese and Korean Studies, specifically in the course Japanese Audiovisual Culture: Manga, Anime and Video Games. He completed the Master’s Degree in New Trends and Innovation Processes in Communication (Extraordinary Master’s Award, 2019/2020) and the Bachelor’s Degree in Audiovisual Communication (Extraordinary Fourth-Year Award, 2013/2014) at Universitat Jaume I of Castellón. He developed his doctoral dissertation on moral dilemmas in video games, undertaking an international research stay at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto (Japan). He specializes in interactive narratives and ludonarrative design in video games.

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Jordi Serrano-Muñoz is a MSCA fellow at Ghent University focusing on comparative literature and climate crisis representation. His current research project explores disasters as a narrative device for representing the climate crisis in contemporary Japanese, Latin-American, and Australian literary productions. He has also worked on the literary representation of post-war Japanese trauma, particularly from Okinawa. He also teaches at the Open University of Catalonia and the University of Granada and is a member of the research groups GREGAL-UAB, INDOVIG-UOC, and STAND-UGR. He was lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at El Colegio de México (2020-2021) and has been a Japan Foundation Fellow at Waseda University (2021-2022). He co-edits Asiademica: Open Journal of East Asian Studies.

Antonio Loriguillo López (loriguil@uji.es) is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences at the Universitat Jaume I (UJI), where he teaches on the Audiovisual Communication and Video Game Design and Development degree courses, and on the Master's degree in New Trends in Communication. His interests focus on post-classical storytelling in contemporary audiovisual media and Japanese commercial animation. In this regard, he is the author of the book Anime complejo. La ambigüedad narrativa en la animación japonesa (Aldea Global, 2021) and the monograph Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997) (Nau Llibres, 2020).

Dr Irene González-López is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research spans Japanese creative industries, with a special focus on postwar cinema and issues related to gender and sexuality, both in front and behind the camera. Her publications explore topics of representation, female authorship, memory, adaptation and remakes, and reception. In 2018 she co-edited the first academic book on actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo (Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity; Edinburgh University Press). She is currently working on a monograph on the representation of sex work in Japanese cinema (Michigan University Press, 2025), and on an edited volume on documentary director Haneda Sumiko (Routledge, 2025). Other recent publications include ‘How to sell a remake: The Gate of Flesh media franchise” (2023); ‘Red-Light Bases (1953), a Cross-temporal Contact Zone’ (2022); and “‘Female Director’: Discourses and Practices in Contemporary Japan” (co-authored with Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández, 2022). Besides academia, Irene often collaborates with film festivals like Open City Doc, film distributors like Arrow Films, and institutions like the British Film Institute, Filmoteca de Catalunya, and Japan Foundation.

Marketa Bajgerova Verly is a Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, conducting a project relating to the memory politics of Shanghai Jewish Refugees in Xi Jinping’s China. In 2024 she obtained her PhD from the University of Vienna focusing on the research of WWII museums in contemporary China, while simultaneously working as a China expert in the Globalized Memorial Museums ERC project at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Previously she obtained an MA degree in China Studies (Politics and International Relations) from Peking University. In China she led a Dean’s Grant project mapping 30 museums across different Chinese provinces devoted to the memory of the War of Resistance against Japan and its memory politics. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Glasgow in Politics and History. 

Syada completed her PhD at Birkbeck, University of London on the South Asian of Representations in Japanese Animation and has a continuing interest in the field, talking at a number of conferences including an International Symposium on Teaching Comics and publishing a chapter on how India is idealised in depictions of World War 2 by history revisionists and glorify the Japanese Empire. She has also taught several undergraduate modules at Birkbeck including Manga and Anime and currently has a YouTube Channel called Everything Eastenders which discusses the long-running British Soap through an intersectional (and fan) perspective. 

My research and teaching focus is on Japanese film and media. In my dissertation,which was later published as the monograph, Illusion of Realism: History of Soviet-Japanese Cinematic Interactions, 1925-1955 (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2018), I present the concept of realism as a recurrent concern and the chief motivating force behind the interactions between Soviet and Japanese filmmakers, critics, and audiences. At Hakubi, I plan to extend my work on the 1950s, highlighting the decade as a transitional yet crucial moment in Japanese history, wherein different visions of the country’s future emerged and were negotiated by and through media. Issues of democracy (minshu-shugi) were among the ones most frequently discussed during this period. Film as a mass medium was manufactured and consumed “collectively,” and served as a space in which the role of the “common people” in the reconstruction of post-war Japan was debated. In my project, I hope to reach a more profound understanding of Japan’s complicated relationship with the concept and practice of “democracy” (i.e., people’s rule) through the study of independent “message films” and comedies that exhibit the early Cold War’s ideologies and politics.

Marie Sevela (PhD) is an independent historian of Russia and Japan, and a translator based in France. She holds a PhD in History from Kokushikan University (Tokyo). Born in Moscow and having studied and taught in the UK, Japan and France, she is particularly interested in cross-cultural and transnational interactions in territories known for their “moving borders”. Along with written sources, she draws on oral history, film and photography in her research. Sevela has worked extensively on the pre-, during and post-war memories and identities among the many former Japanese, Korean and Ainu Karafuto (Sakhalin) residents for her thesis “Held in transition: Japanese nationals under Soviet rule on the Island of Karafuto/Sakhalin (1945-1949). Words, Objects, Images”. /  樺太とサハリンの狭間で:  ソ連統治への移行期における日本人住民 <1945~1949> 言葉 • 物 •画像 ).

Professor of Anthropology of Japan and director of the CERAO (East Asian Studies & Research Centre) at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), where he is also coordinator of University Master’s Degree in Global East Asian Studies. He has been a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellow (MICINN-JDC, Government of Spain) at the UAB, visiting fellow at the National Museum of Ethnology in Japan (Minpaku), postdoctoral scholar (BP-A AGAUR) in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, and visiting researcher (Monbukagakushō, Government of Japan) in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tokyo. He coordinates the Media Studies Section of the EAJS (European Association for Japanese Studies), is a JAWS (Japan Anthropology Workshop) board member, and is the editor-in-chief and director of the book series Biblioteca de Estudios Japoneses (CERAO-UAB & Ed. Bellaterra). His publications include: “The World is a Room: Beyond Centers and Peripheries in the Global Production of Anthropological Knowledge,” Focaal, 63: 8-19 (2012), the co-edition with Shinji Yamashita of Japan in Global Circulation: Transnational Migration and Multicultural Politics, in Kokuritsu Minzokugaku Hakubutsukan Kenkyū Hōkoku, 40 (1), National Museum of Ethnology in Japan (2015), and  the books Escaping Japan: Reflections on Estrangement and Exile in the Twenty-first Century, Routledge, 2018 (with Paul Hansen, Hokkaido University) and Persistently Postwar: Media and the Politics of Memory in Japan, Berghahn Books, 2019 (with Artur Lozano-Méndez, UAB, y D.P. Martinez, University of Oxford). 

Eduardo López-Pintor Madrid és doctor en Història de l’Art per la Universitat de València, on va obtindre la qualificació de Sobresaliente Cum Laude amb mencions especials gràcies a una tesi dedicada a Dragon Ball com a obra d’art total. Disposa de quatre graus universitaris —Història de l’Art, Dret, Ciències Polítiques i Filosofia— i tres màsters oficials: Professorat d’Educació Secundària, Advocacia i Pràctica Jurídica, i Dret Esportiu. Esta formació múltiple li permet abordar la cultura japonesa des de perspectives estètiques, filosòfiques, econòmiques, jurídiques i socio-polítiques d’una manera integrada. La seua investigació se centra en la mitologia comparada, l’ètica marcial, l’estètica visual del Japó contemporani i l’expansió transmedia del manga i l’anime, amb especial atenció a l’obra d’Akira Toriyama. Ha presentat comunicacions en congressos internacionals i participa en publicacions acadèmiques en editorials de prestigi. Actualment compagina la docència amb projectes especialitzats en cultura popular japonesa.

Terushi Morimoto is a PhD student in Communication and Inter-culturality at the Universitat de València. He graduated with a Master’s degree in Japanese Intellectual History from the Tohoku University in 2016. During his doctoral studies at Tohoku University, he studied as an international student at the University of Salamanca (2019-2020) and taught one of the Japanese language classes. His main area of interest is the thout of Yokoi Shōnan (a Confusian scholar in the period of Bakumatsu), the Ethos of noble military classes especially in the Edo era, Intercultural understanding from the Edo to Meiji eras, and “Japan” in the Meiji era as seen by the Spanish.

Humanist passionate about the differences between cultures and the so-called “otherness”, especially in Asia, and Japan in particular. She began studying Japanese at the age of 15 at the EOI, reaching level B1, in addition to obtaining other language diplomas such as B2 English and C1 Valencian. Graduated in high school with honors, she simultaneously studied two degrees, History and Art History at the UV, specializing in the critique of Eurocentrism, the visibility of minorities and the art of the grotesque.  She has also completed the master's degree in political philosophy “Ethics and Democracy” of the UV, focusing her research on global inequalities, development cooperation and intercultural education, as well as the postgraduate course in “Japanese Studies” of the Faculty of Philology (UV), for which she was able to collaborate in the series of conferences “Transculturaliy and Diversity in East Asia”. 

Finally, she is currently studying for a Master's degree in Secondary School Teacher Training, at the same time as she begins her doctoral studies in the area of intercultural communication.

Ryan Choi is a PhD candidate in Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where his thesis, Collaborationism in Wartime Hong Kong: The Cultural Production of Hanjian (Traitors) under Japanese Occupation, 1941–1945, explores the cultural and literary history of Japanese-occupied Hong Kong. His research specifically focuses on marginalised cultural figures labelled as hanjian (漢奸), or traitors to the Han Chinese, in the post-war period. As a cultural historian, Ryan Choi engages with a diverse range of literature and archival documents from Japanese-occupied regions in East Asia, including Hong Kong, Manchukuo, and Shanghai during World War II, as well as colonial Taiwan. 

In 2024, Ryan Choi served as a visiting scholar at the Hong Kong History Centre at the University of Bristol. He previously earned an MA in Chinese Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, in 2021, and a BA in Chinese from the University of Hong Kong in 2019.