Gabriella Lukacs author profile

Gabriella Lukacs is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on contemporary Japanese culture, technology and mass media, and issues surrounding capitalism and labor. She received her PhD from the Duke University cultural anthropology department.

Lukacs’ first book Scripted Affects, Branded Selves (2010, published by Duke University Press) explores aspects of television audience fragmentation in Japan in the 1990s during which the industry shifted (she argues) away from “narrative-based entertainment to selling lifestyle.” A review in the Journal of Japanese Studies called it “a major contribution to the understanding of contemporary or recent Japanese popular culture.”

Her latest research, like the article about Japanese cell phone novelists focuses more broadly on “net idols who become famous by posting their photos and diaries on the web,” homemaker day-traders, and others who are using new media technologies to change the nature of what constitutes work vs. play in the 21st Century.

Incidentally for someone who studies new media, Lukacs’ online presence is pretty limited. Most of what I could find out about her came from her Pitt bio.