Professor Lukacs received her PhD from Duke University in 2005. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research explores the themes of mass media (television) new media technologies (Internet, cellular phones), capitalism, subjectivity, labor, and neoliberal governmentality in contemporary Japan.
Her first book, Scripted Affects, Branded Selvesanalyzes post-signification television in 1990s Japan. It focuses on late 1980s development of a new primetime serial, the trendy drama. It interprets the genre as a shift in the Japanese television industry from producing narrative-based entertainment to selling lifestyle.
Her current project continues to examine questions of subjectivity and capitalism but it focuses on new media technologies. The manuscript she is presently working on
examines new labor subjectivities such as the net idols who become famous by posting their photos and diaries on the web, cell phone novelists whose novels have recently come to dominate literary bestseller lists, and entrepreneurial homemakers who conjure wealth from day trading. She posits that these new labor subjectivities bring into sharp focus changes in the meanings, forms, and conditions of work.
DATE: January 19, 2011
LOCATION: Room 240, Franklin Center, Duke
TIME: 7:00pm