Sharalyn Orbaugh is Professor of modern Japanese literature and popular culture at the University of British Columbia, where she is currently Head of the Department of Asian Studies. One of her primary research topics is the visual and narrative culture of wartime and Allied Occupation era Japan (1930s to 1950s), particularly prose fiction, popular magazines, and kamishibai (paper theatre). 

She has published on the censorship of cultural products during this period, as well as on the nature and function of propaganda in a comparative context, examining visual and narrative propaganda media produced by the governments of both “totalitarian” and “democratic” participants in World War Two. Publications in this area include: Propaganda Performed: Kamishibai in Japan’s Fifteen Year War (Leiden: Brill, 2015); “Kamishibai and the Art of the Interval” (Mechademia 1.7, 2012); “How the Pendulum Swings: Kamishibai and Censorship Under the Allied Occupation” (Tomi Suzuki et. al. eds., Censorship, Media and Literary Culture in Japan, Tokyo: Shin’yōsha, 2012).