Department of English

• Monday, September 21, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

Today, we are absolutely thrilled to have Nicole Rousmaniere (Deputy Director General, MOA Museum of Art, and Professor Emerita, University of East Anglia) for a talk titled "From Page to Exhibition: Creating Art of Manga.”

Professor Rousmaniere writes:

“Manga as a Japanese visual narrative art form has grown over the last 100 years to become a global phenomenon. Initially referring to comics and graphic novels, manga has expanded beyond its original hand-drawn forms to include a variety of expressions, including digital forms, art, fashion, and new media, and as a result has an immense international reach. Manga’s superpower is its ability to immerse a reader in a story to experience the characters’ emotions deeply. Readers become so engaged with the characters and their stories that many leave comments on social media and send letters to the artists; these notes are monitored by the publishing companies and artists and influence future manga content.

Manga is read by people of all ages globally. It is also big business: the turnover of the Japanese manga industry alone in 2025 was approximately 4.63 billion dollars. The Art of Manga exhibition is the first large-scale manga exhibition of original drawings (genga) and storyboards (nemu) from different artists and multiple publishers to be held in the USA. The Art of Manga exhibition, which originated in the San Francisco Fine Arts Museum, will be shown in the Brooklyn Museum from Oct 3 to March 8, 2027. This talk explores the creation of this exhibition, challenges involved in bringing together artists, publishers, and original artworks, and what the process reveals about manga as a distinctive and increasingly global art form.”

Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere is Deputy Director of the MOA Museum of Art and Professor emeritus of Japanese Art and Culture at the University of East Anglia. She completed her doctoral studies at Harvard University in 1998. After teaching Japanese art history at the University of East Anglia and helping form the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, Rousmaniere served as its first Director from 1999. Her major publications include Vessels of Influence: China and the Birth of Porcelain in Medieval and Modern Japan (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012) and the English translation of Tsuji Nobuo’s History of Art in Japan (A History of Art in Japan, Tokyo University Press, 2018).

Until 2019, she worked as a curator in the Japanese section of the Asia Department at the British Museum, where she served as lead curator for the 2007 exhibition Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan and the 2019 Citi Exhibition Manga. She was responsible for the planning and curation of The Art of Manga exhibition held at the de Young Museum in San Francisco from September 2025 to February 2026, now traveling to the Brooklyn Museum from October to March. More information on the exhibition is available here.