Dru Pagliassotti, Ph.D.

Professor

Book this person as a speaker:

Email: paglia@callutheran.edu

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?

"Dr. Dru" Pagliassotti teaches website design, film theory, film studies, news writing, and copy editing, and supervises student internships. Dru's co-taught classes have included the art/communication travel course Imagining Venice, which took students to Venice and Florence in 2011, 2013, and 2018; the history/communication travel course Faces of India, which took students to India in 2006; and an art/communication course on the history, sociology, and creation of comics, ComicComm. Dru served as the Communication Department chair from 2013-2019 and from 2018-2019 headed the task force that shifted CLU's faculty governance from a full-faculty assembly model to a Faculty Senate/Faculty Assembly model.

Dr. Dru's research interests revolve around the portrayal of gender and sexuality in popular culture. Dru is currently working on a paper applying monster theory to popular characterizations of COVID-19 and recently finished a chapter about neo-Victorian comics. Past research has examined the development and growing popularity of boys' love (yaoi) manga in the West, including a PLOS article that analyzes people's motives for reading yaoi that was co-written with researchers in Hungary. Dr. Dru has also written a chapter on the role of technology in steampunk romance and erotica for Steaming into a Victorian Future and a chapter about female mad scientists in Neo-Victorian Humour: Comic Subversions and Unlaughter in Contemporary Historical Re-Visions. Dru serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies and Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural.

Dr. Dru is the author of four novels and a number of short stories; owned and edited The Harrow, an online literary magazine for fantasy and horror, for 11.5 years; and ran The Harrow Press, a publisher of print horror anthologies, for seven years. Dru's past professional experience includes editorial work on print books, journals, and trade magazines; freelance website design; and serving as a content provider for a roleplaying games site on About.Com. Dr. Dru holds a black belt in kempo, plays Dungeons & Dragons, adores iguanas, and is currently trying to master Spanish.