Nick Stember is a London-based translator and historian of Chinese literature and popular culture. In 2016 he completed his Master of Arts in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia with his thesis on the formation of the Shanghai Cartoon Society in the mid-1920s. He recently defended his PhD dissertation on “pulp science” in early Reform-era (1976-1986) comic books in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge, titled Low Culture Fever: Pulp Science in Chinese Comic Books After Mao. For his next book project, tentatively titled Soft Sell: The Business and Politics of Translating Popular Chinese Culture he plans to turn to the 21st century to look at the “digital turn” in the promotion of both high and low “analogue” culture overseas over the last decade.

In addition to co-founding the Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel in 2017, Nick’s work has been featured on the websites of The Comics Journal, Paper Republic, Danwei, Frog in a Well,  Optical Sloth, Tor, Boing Boing, iO9, Rolling Stone, the BBC World Service, and the South China Morning Post.  Since 2014, he has worked as a consultant for a variety of ventures, including the Jia Pingwa Institute’s Ugly Stone initiative, Storycom and Clarkesworld Magazine’s Chinese Science Fiction Translation Project and the Grayhawk Agency and the Ministry of Culture (ROC)’s Books from Taiwan.

This blog is part of a larger project to build the world’s first English language encyclopedia of Chinese comics and animation, the Encyclopædia Manhuannica 漫畫百科.

If you have any suggestions for future projects, please reach out!