Tokyo 1968 Sources & Stories: A historian writes a graphic novel

Chelsea Szendi Schieder

November 19, 2026 / 18:30-20:00

Room 10-301, 3F, Building 10, Sophia University

In person only / No registration required

What is the difference between writing a graphic novel and writing a history? In this talk, the presenter will discuss her experience working with artist Helene Aldeguer on writing a fictionalized graphic novel based on the research for her book, Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left (Duke UP 2021). The resultant work, Tokyo 68 (Libertalia 2025, U of Toronto forthcoming), attempts to foreground the lived daily experiences of young women participating in a social movement. She will explain the collaborative decisions about theme and character, the risks involved in fictionalizing history, and also the challenges a historian trained in thematic and textual analysis faced working in a narrative and visual medium. The talk thus invites the audience to think about how we tell history, and what sources and stories become privileged or erased, depending on the medium we tell it in.

Chelsea Szendi Schieder (Ph.D. Columbia University, East Asian Languages and Cultures, 2014) is Professor in the College of Economics at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. She writes about protest, women, violence, and Japan for academic and general audiences. Her 2021 book Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left (Duke UP) contextualizes the gendered meaning of the female student activist in postwar Japanese society and social movements. The research for this academic monograph became the basis for a fictionalized graphic novel co-created with Helene Aldeguer, out in French as Tokyo 68 (Libertalia), and forthcoming in English as Tokyo 1968: Year of Friendship and Struggle (University of Toronto Press). She also works as a curator, most recently of an exhibit on feminist and queer archives at the Museum of Modern Art, Bologna; edits the “Forum: Asia, Feminism, Activism” section of the Asian Journal of Women’s Studies; and is involved in ongoing collaborative research projects on labor movements, grassroots archives, gendered violence, and activist lawsuits. Her current monograph in progress is on gendered work, disability, and justice at the Miike coal mines.

This talk is organized by Megha Wadhwa (Assistant Professor, DES, Sophia University).