Learn about the origins and antecedents of anime, manga, and cosplay from three specialists in the history of Japanese visual popular culture. Christopher Bolton (professor of comparative and Japanese literature at Williams College), Eron Rauch (artist, critic, and instructor at Cal Arts), and Maggie Wei Wu (Ph.D. student in art history at UC San Diego) will give you a sneak peak at their current collaboration, Repro Japan–a museum exhibition of Japanese popular culture that spans two centuries and a dozen different media. These range from 18th-century woodblock prints and kimono fashion through 19th-century tourist photography, down to contemporary anime and manga, cosplay and cosplay photography, and Lolita fashion. The panel will give you a behind-the-scenes look at the exhibition (scheduled for summer and fall 2021 at the Williams College Museum of Art), and deepen your understanding of these media by making some surprising comparisons between them.