TALKS

Have MacBook, will travel!

I give talks and illustrated presentations on Japanese animation and comics, costume and needlework, art and creativity, to audiences ranging from a class of five-year-olds to one man and a dog to academics to creative practitioners.

I’ve spoken in St. Magnus the Martyr church in the City of London about the clothing of ordinary Londoners in the fourteenth century, at the University of Maryland on character development in the films of Hayao Miyazaki, at the Fandom and Neomedia Studies conference in Dallas on the global history of cosplay, at Akita International University in Japan on researching anime, at the Filmhuset Copenhagen on anime and Miyazaki as part of the European City of Culture celebrations, and at the Smithsonian Institution on Osamu Tezuka.

Dozens of convention presentations have ranged from touring Japan on a limited budget with zero linguistic skills to starting a creative business to cheeky artistic crossovers like The Manga Beatles.

For the past three years I’ve been giving talks on the Art History of Studio Ghibli and occasional deep dives into specific films for Seed Talks. (I will link to booking pages for each specific talk on the News item for that talk.) I’m also working on a series of on-demand online talks to download from their website. In October 2025 I gave two presentations at Quay Arts Centre in Newport, Isle of Wight, one on Studio Ghibli and one an epic tour of the interlinked history of anime and manga from the eighth century CE to the box office success of Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle.

To enquire about booking a talk,  contact me here.