Student profiles
Leonie Rowland
Twitter: @leonie_rowland (Twitter)
Email: leonie.a.rowland@stu.mmu.ac.uk
Website: https://www.leonierowland.com
Thesis Title
Institution
Supervisors
Dr. Linnie Blake
Dr. Matthew Carter
Research Summary
My research indexes depictions of commodity animism—that is, the symbolic animation of the material world in a commercial context—in Japanese Gothic texts. This marketing technique, emerging from the intersection of capitalist materiality and indigenous spirituality, provides a vehicle for the Gothic expression of alternative forms of horror that expose rather than reinforce the harm enacted by a socioeconomic system that desecrates the spiritual.
Research Interests
Japanese Gothic,
Japanese horror,
Asian Gothic,
socioeconomics,
capitalist realism,
literature
and film.
Publications
Selected conference papers
‘She Gets You Through the Phone’:
Criminal Commodities and Communications Technologies in the Techno-Animism of One Missed Call (Captivating Criminality, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, 2023)
Chair Gives an Evil Cackle: Japanese Gothic in the Age of Animist Capitalism (De-Westernizing Horror, KCL, 2022)
‘A Phone was Found Inside Her’: Techno-Animism as Trauma in the Folklore of Ju-On: Origins (Gothic in Asia Association, online, 2022)
‘Love in a Chair’: Commodity Animism and the Prophetic Past in Edogawa Rampo’s ‘The Human Chair’ (The Past as Nightmare, Reading University, 2022)
‘You Want to See Your Feet Come Off, Don’t You?’: The Logic of Commodity Animism in Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue and Ryu Murakami’s Audition (International Gothic Association, University of Dublin, 2022)
‘She Lusted After Buildings, and They Lusted After Her’: Fetishizing the Domestic Space in Junji Ito’s Fragments of Horror (Gothic Spaces, Tokyo University, 2019)
‘My Hands, My Feet—They Existed Only for the Store!’: The Search for an Empty Self in Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (Reimagining the Gothic, Sheffield University, 2018)
Publications
‘She Lusted After Buildings, and They Lusted After Her’: Objectophilia and Commodity Animism in Junji Ito’s ‘Wooden Spirit’ and ‘Futon’ (Fantastika Journal, February 2022)
‘Love in a Chair’: Industrialisation and Exploitation Edogawa Rampo’s ‘The Human Chair’ and Junji Ito’s Manga Adaptation (Lexington, November 2021)