Diane Wei ​ Lewis

Diane Wei ​ Lewis

Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies
Performing Arts Department (Affiliate), East Asian Languages and Cultures (Affiliate), MDes for Human-Computer Interaction and Emerging Technology (Affiliate), Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (Affiliate)
PhD, University of Chicago
research interests:
  • Japanese Film and Media
  • Gender and Labor in Media Industries
  • History of Information and Communication Technologies
  • Mass Culture and Modernity

contact info:

mailing address:

  • WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

    CB 1174

    ONE BROOKINGS DR.

    ST. LOUIS, MO 63130-4899

Diane Wei Lewis's research focuses on gender and labor in Japanese media industries.

Her current project, Kitchen Programmers: Women, Work, and Information Technologies in 1960s–1980s Japan, examines the rise of computer and network technologies in Japan. This book explores how theories of the “information society” imagined the future of labor and employment. It analyzes women’s actual and imagined role in computerization to reveal the competing economic and social logics that coexisted within techno-utopian discourses in Japan.

Lewis is also interested in creative labor and how perceptions of media authorship are impacted by gender, marital status, employment type, and industrial context—which she has explored through analysis of creative couples like Ichikawa Kon and Wada Natto, Tsuge Yoshiharu and Fujiwara Maki, and individual filmmakers like Imamura Shōhei and Haneda Sumiko. In addition, she has written extensively on Japanese media culture in the 1910s and 1920s—key decades for the industrialization of cinema, the emergence of mass culture, and the introduction of new communications technologies in Japan.

Her first book, Powers of the Real: Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2019), explores how the devastating 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake heightened the stakes for thinking about cinema's ability to address a mass audience and shape public sentiment. Post-earthquake artists, writers, critics, and filmmakers used images of women and ideas about femininity to represent cinema’s dangers and appeals. Analysis of these representations demonstrates the centrality of gender and sexuality to vernacular media theories.

Her work has been supported by the Japan Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays DDRA, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, the Association for Asia Studies Northeast Asia Council, and the Washington University in St. Louis Center for the Humanities.

Selected Publications

Books

Powers of the Real: Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

“The Modern Girl at Work: Typists and Telephone Operators in Early 1930s Japanese and Hollywood Films.” In『モダンガールの光と影』(The Modern Girl’s Light and Shadow), edited by Ogawa Sawako and Shimura Miyoko, Moriwasha (under contract).

“Gendered Citizenship, Democracy, and Welfare Reform in the Films of Haneda Sumiko.” In The Japanese Documentary Cinema of Haneda Sumiko: Art, Gender, Society, and Culture, edited by Marcos Centeno, Irene González-López, and Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández, Routledge (forthcoming in 2026).

“A High Commercial Aesthetic: Rethinking Authorship and Adaptation through the Films of Kon Ichikawa and Natto Wada.” In ReFocus: The Films of Kon Ichikawa, edited by Kyle Barrowman, Edinburgh University Press (forthcoming in 2026).

“Kyoto—The ‘Hollywood of Japan.’” In A Companion to Japanese Cinema, edited by David Desser, 27-48. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2022.

“Home Movies of the Revolution: Proletarian Filmmaking and Counter-Mobilization in Interwar Japan.” In Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema, edited by Joanne Bernardi and Shota Ogawa, 51-67. New York: Routledge, 2020.

“‘The Longed-For Crystal Palace’: Empire, Modernity, and Nikkatsu Mukōjima’s Glass Studio, 1913-1923.” In In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments, edited by Brian Jacobson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020. Winner of the 2021 SCMS Best Edited Collection Award.

“Boundary Play: Truth, Fiction, and Performance in A Man Vanishes (1967).” In Killers, Clients and Kindred Spirits: The Taboo Cinema of Shohei Imamura, edited by Lindsay Coleman and David Desser. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

“From Manga to Film: Gender, Precarity and the Textual Transformation of Air Doll,” Screen 60:1 (Spring 2019): 99-121.

“Blood and Soul (1923) and the Cultural Politics of Japanese Film Reform,” positions: asia critique 26:3 (August 2018): 451-82.   

“Shiage and Women’s Flexible Labor in the Japanese Animation Industry,” Feminist Media Histories, special issue on “Labor,” edited by Denise McKenna, 4:1 (Winter 2018): 115-141. 

“Media Fantasies: Women, Mobility, and Silent-Era Japanese Ballad Films,” Cinema Journal 52:3 (Spring 2013): 99-119.