Richard Maddison Davis

Richard Davis is a film and media scholar who works on cinematic crossings between Japan, East Asia, and the United States. His in-progress monograph, Sing Your Way to Heaven, describes the collisions between aesthetics, ideology, and pleasure in musical films produced in Imperial Japan during the so-called Fifteen Years' War (1931-1945). Two articles from this project have been published: "Imaginary Conquests: Folktales, Film, and the Japanese Empire in Asia" (Ex-Position 42) and "Whose Blue Heaven? Musicality in the Early Japanese Talkies" (The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 10/1). Additional research and teaching interests include international film history, East Asian modernities, animation, and film theory.