Christopher Taylor's research interests centers on the artificially animated body across modern Japanese science fiction, animation, design, and visual culture from transnational and comparative perspectives. His current book project, Animated Otherwise: A Genealogy of Artificial Life in Modern Japan, explores the transwar history and contemporary afterlives of Japanese intellectuals’ engagements with the figure of the artificial human and the prospect of artificial animacy as they sought to navigate the experience of technological modernity.

Dr. Taylor's teaching interests span Japanese media and visual culture, global animation and special effects film history, modernist studies, modernity studies, aesthetics, affect, and translation studies. His courses interrogate how film, animation, and adjacent media forms have been used as tools for two sometimes complementary, sometimes antagonistic functions: as spectacular, affective media that suspend disbelief and mobilize wonder, and as apparatuses of recording that afford privileged epistemic access to whatever passes under the camera’s mechanical gaze.

His research has been supported by fellowships from the Blakemore Foundation, the JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science), and the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. He currently serves as the junior co-chair of the Animated Media SIG of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Undergraduate

• Modernist Animacies and the Politics of Wonder
• SOUL: Translation, Traveling Texts and Media
• Animation and Philosophy
• Japanese Animation: History, Theory, Ecology

Public Humanities

• 2500+ Years of Artificial Life: AI and the Idea of the Human

Osaka Expo 2025 “Co-Creating Cultures for the Future” Theme Week Panel: “The Future of Narrative and Embodiment” (April 29, 2025).