John A. Crespi

I am an associate professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Asian Studies at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, where I have taught courses in Chinese language, literature, and culture since 2002. I began my scholarly career studying modern Chinese poetry, and in 2009 published the book Voices in Revolution: Poetry and the Auditory Imagination in Modern China (University of Hawai'i Press). While exploring archives and used bookshops in China for Voices in the 1990s, I began to encounter a very different, and often quite visually arresting, kind of material: China's cartoons, or "manhua" (漫画) from the middle decades of the 20th Century. My first publication on manhua introduces and explores the magazine Modern Sketch (Shidai manhua 时代漫画), published in Shanghai from 1934-1937. That richly illustrated essay can be found at the MIT Visualizing Cultures website.

My book Manhua Modernity: Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn (University of California Press, 2020) is the culmination of a decade of work spent tracking down and examining rare magazines and other ephemeral materials where manhua appeared from the 1920s through the 1950s. Manhua Modernity explores the intersection of manhua, magazines, and modernity in China across the forty years when these polymorphic pictures figured prominently in popular periodicals dedicated to everything from introducing cosmopolitan city life in Shanghai, to promoting national defense against the Japanese invasion, to mobilizing the masses for political campaigns related to the Korean War, the Hundred Flowers movement, and the Great Leap Forward. Manhua gave visual form to evolving imaginations of fashion, humor, satire, propaganda, and much more. Across all these topics I argue that to truly understand manhua, one has to go beyond the notion of the "cartoon" or "comic" to see how these images thrived on the lively pages of China's popular magazines.

I received my PhD from the University of Chicago in 2001. Aside from my two books, I have published translations and scholarly articles in range of journals and edited volumes.