This project was born out of a graduate seminar on visual representation of the Japanese American incarceration in Spring 2020 taught by Stephanie Takaragawa at Chapman University. Along with graduate student Winston Andrus, the idea for an exhibition of comics generated inside and outside the camps during WWII arose during the course of this class.

In Fall 2020, Takaragawa was awarded a Chapman University internal Innovation in Diversity and Inclusion Research, Scholarly and Creative Activity grant to begin work on this project. Working with student research assistant, Winston Andrus, Takagarwa has identified archival materials, images, and comics that feature the internment for this project. 

Jessica Bocinski, Manager of the Escalette Collection of Art at Chapman University, has joined the team to assist with coordinating the physical and virtual iterations of this exhibition. Dr. Jan Osborn serves as Humanities advisor for the project and directs and oversees pedagogical issues for the website. 

This activity is funded by the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program. 

The Team

Dr. Stephanie Takaragawa, Project Director. Stephanie Takaragawa is a cultural anthropologist whose areas of research include representations of the Japanese American internment, the anthropology of space and place, and the anthropology of visual communication. She has published broadly in visual culture, museums, and material culture in the Japanese American incarceration camps. She is a founding member of the curatorial collective Ethnographic Terminalia and has over ten years of exhibition and curation experience. She has curated exhibitions and installations at SOMArts (San Francisco), American Museum of Natural History (New York), Theater Gates’ Arts Incubator (Chicago), Eastern Bloc Center for New Media (Montreal), and other museums and galleries. Her volunteer service includes Manzanar National Historic Site and the Japanese American National Museum. 

Winston Andrus received his MA in War and Society from Chapman University. His thesis was on representations of war in the Golden and Silver Age of comics. His thesis and a scalar project he created about representations of war in comics, and about incarceration camps has been utilized in the 50 object/stories Japanese American incarceration project. 

Jessica Bocinski is the Registrar for the Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University. She received her BA in Art History and Anthropology from Chapman University in 2018 before beginning her career as a museum professional. As Registrar, Jessica has focused on expanding the collection’s accessibility by creating virtual exhibitions on Scalar, building an online collection on eMuseum, and updating social media marketing strategies. Through improved inventory processes and object research, she has also supported the Escalette Collection’s goals of acquiring works by diverse artists and integrating those works into curated exhibitions throughout campus.

Dr. Rei Magosaki is a specialist in the field of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature and culture. Dr. Magosaki’s monograph, Tricksters and Cosmopolitans: Cross-Cultural Collaborations in Asian American Literary Production (Fordham UP, 2016), is the first sustained exploration into the history of cross-cultural collaborations between Asian American writers and their non-Asian American editors and publishers. She writes in both English and in Japanese, and her scholarly essays have been published in the U.S., Japan, India, and elsewhere. She is currently undertaking a project that involves all 10 Japanese American internment camps.

Dr. Jan Osborn is an Associate Professor of English and a specialist in rhetoric. Her work in discourse analysis is featured in her book Community Colleges and First-Generation Students: Academic Discourse in the Writing Classroom (2015). She is the faculty liaison for the Orange High School Young Writers’ Collaborative and the Orange County Literary Society Partnership. Dr. Osborn will provide insight into visual rhetoric, lending her expertise to contextualizing the role of comics in society, while providing connections of local area high schools and literacy programs.

Special thanks to Allison Devries, Manager of Grants Development and Administration for the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and Dean Dr. Jennifer Keene for her support on this project.