Speakers & Experts

 
Dru Pagliassotti, Ph.D.
Professor of Communication

Email: paglia@callutheran.edu

Biography

"Dr. Dru" teaches classes in news writing, copy editing, and Web publishing, as well as one of the Communication Department's senior capstone courses, film theory. She has also co-taught several travel courses, including the art/communication course Imagining Venice, which took students to Venice and Florence in 2011 and will again in 2013, and Faces of India, a history/communication travel course that took students to India in 2006.


Her research has examined the development and growing popularity of boys' love (yaoi) manga in the West and is now addressing the rise of the female-authored male/male romance novel as a discrete publishing niche. Her YaoiResearch.Com blog helps others researching the same topics keep track of new work in these areas. Her most recent paper, in press, is about the role technology plays in steampunk m/f, f/f, and m/m romance fiction. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies.


Dr. Pagliassotti's interest in fiction and publishing arises from her own work in the field as the published author of two novels and a number of short stories. She is the owner and editor-in-chief of The Harrow Press, which publishes horror anthologies, and for 11.5 years she was the owner and editor-in-chief of The Harrow, an online literary magazine for fantasy and horror. Her past professional experience includes editorial work on print books, journals, and trade magazines; freelance Web site design; and serving as a content provider on roleplaying games for About.Com.


Speeches:

  • ""Boy's Love" in the Western World"

    The "boy's love" genre (slash, yaoi, shounen-ai) of male/male homoerotica, primarily written and read by heterosexual women, has been steadily growing in the Western world, most recently with the rapidly increasing importation of yaoi manga from Japan. Why has it become so popular, what kind of women read and write it, and what, if any, cultural differences exist in its fandom between various countries?

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