Michael Blouin
Areas of Interest
- Popular Culture
- Film Studies
- U.S. - Japan Cultural Exchanges
- The Horror Genre
- Transnationalism
Biography
Michael Blouin is a first year Ph.D. student in the American Studies Program. He earned his MA in English with an emphasis in Film Studies at the University of Vermont. His thesis focused on issues of anxiety surrounding modernity, exploring “the uncanny” as a transnational phenomenon being shaped by exchanges between Japan and the U.S.
His research centers broadly on issues of fear in culture, directly considering Japanese horror films and their U.S. re-makes. He is interested in how moments of cultural anxiety, from Turner’s closing of the frontier to the atomic bomb to anxieties surrounding technology and national debt, have created a shared aesthetics of fear in America and Japan from the early 20th century until today. More broadly, he is interested in how popular culture has shaped the aesthetics of these two nations, using a transnational lens. Michael is also interested in American Gothic literature, especially the works of Lafcadio Hearn and Edgar Allan Poe, the Horror Film, the philosophical debates over the "End of History" from Hegel to Fukuyama, the history of American imperialism, and literary theory. Michael currently teaches a freshman writing course in MSU’s Writing, Rhetoric, and America Cultures Program.
Michael recently moved to East Lansing after a summer of coaching youth basketball in New York City. He will be participating in the exchange program with Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan during the 2009-2010 academic year.
