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.

Estel·la Ramírez Martínez is a Spanish researcher, intercultural communicator, writer, and lecturer specializing in Japanese Studies. She holds a Bachelor's degree in History (UA) and a Master's degree in East Asian Studies (USAL) with honors. She has complemented her academic background with a stay at the Kudan Institute of Japanese Language and Culture, as well as online specialization programs at prestigious international institutions such as the University of Tokyo, Keio University, Waseda University, and Harvard University. Throughout her career, she has collaborated with various international institutions linked to the Asia-Pacific. She currently teaches at specialized training centers and actively participates in events and platforms dedicated to the dissemination of Japanese history, society, and culture, such as Japonés en la Nube, Academia Japonia, Casa Asia, and JNTO. She is also the author of the book «La sociedad japonesa: pasado, presente y nuevos horizontes», published by Satori Ediciones.