Rachael Hutchinson

Biography

Rachael Hutchinson is Professor in Japanese Studies at the University of Delaware. She received her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2000, and her research addresses representations of Japanese identity in a range of narrative texts – literature, film, manga and videogames. Her major publications are Nagai Kafū's Occidentalism: Defining the Japanese Self (author, SUNY Press 2011), Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature: A Critical Approach (co-editor, Routledge 2007), Negotiating Censorship in Modern Japan (editor, Routledge 2013), and The Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature (co-editor, Routledge 2016). She has published essays in  journals such as Japan Forum, Monumenta Nipponica, Japanese Studies, and Games and Culture, contributing various chapters to books on Japanese games, manga, literature and film. Her most recent publication is Japanese Culture Through Videogames (Routledge, 2019), nominated for the John Whitney Hall Book Prize at the Association for Asian Studies, and featured on the podcasts 'Meiji at 150' and 'Japan Station'. She is currently working on an edited volume on the Japanese role-playing game genre, the JRPG.

Hutchinson believes passionately in undergraduate research and writing, incorporating writing and presentation skills in all her courses. She teaches advanced Japanese language, reading and translation, as well as culture courses such as 'Issues in Japanese Film', 'Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature', and 'Videogames and Japanese Culture'. Her students have presented academic papers at such prestigious conferences as the GEIS Student Research on Women conference (2010), the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies conference (2013, 2017, 2019) and the Greater Philadelphia Asian Studies Consortium (2014). Hutchinson has served as faculty liaison to the Japanese National Honor Society on campus as well as advisor to the UD Anime and Manga Club, the Kendo Club, Aikido Club, Genshiken and the UD Videogame Tournament Club.

As co-founder of the UD Game Studies Research Group, Hutchinson received a grant from the IHRC to further Game Studies on campus, through interfaculty collaboration as well as course development and expansion of library holdings. Hutchinson established the Games Lab on campus in 2009 and has delivered papers at national conferences on using videogames in a university syllabus.

Degrees

• D.Phil. Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, 2000
• B.A.Hon. History and Japanese, University of Newcastle, Australia, 1995