Scholar Looks at 1950s Big Bug Movies
Johnson County Community College |
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| William Tsutsui |
OVERLAND PARK, Kan. – William Tsutsui, a scholar in residence at Johnson County Community College, will present the lecture, Looking Straight at ‘Them!’ Understanding Hollywood’s Big Bug Movies of the 1950s, from 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m. Thursday, April 26, in the Craig Community Auditorium on the second floor of the General Education Building. The event is free and open to the public.
Giant insects, from the ants of Them! to the locusts of Beginning of the End, figured prominently in Hollywood films of the 1950s and early 1960s. Most scholars have read these mutant arthropods as transparent metaphors, representing anything from the Communist menace to nuclear fear to repressed Freudian anxieties. This presentation reassesses films of the big bug genre, looking at them from the novel standpoint of environmental history.
Tsutsui, professor and chair of the department of history and executive director of the Confucius Institute, the University of Kansas, is a lifelong fan of Japanese monster movies. He is the author of Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (2004), which was awarded the William Rockhill Nelson Prize for nonfiction and called a “cult classic” by the New York Times. He is the author or editor of five other books, including the collection In Godzilla’s Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage (2006) and the award-winning study Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth-Century Japan (1998).
Tsutsui has a doctorate in history from Princeton University, master of letters in modern history from Oxford, and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard.
A former president of the Kansas State Historical Society, he is currently conducting research on the environmental impact of World War II, the globalization of Japanese popular culture, and the history of sports in East Asia. Professor Tsutsui is the recipient of a W.T. Kemper Fellowship for excellence in teaching and the Steeples Family Award for service to the people of Kansas.
JCCC’s scholar-in-residence program is designed to bring visiting scholars to students, faculty and the public. Tsutsui will also address JCCC students and faculty in a colloquium, Japan Today: The Rise of a Soft Superpower. Japanese pop culture, from anime to Hello Kitty to Iron Chef, is all around us in the United States today. This seminar will explore the origins of Japan's remarkable pop culture creativity, the reasons why Western audiences have embraced Japanese entertainment products, and the potential economic and political significance of Japanese "soft power" on the contemporary world scene.
Tsutsui’s residency is sponsored by Jay Antle, associate professor, history. For more information, e-mail Antle at jantle@jccc.edu.
