Frenchy Lunning

Nancy Lunning is an American academic who specializes in anime. She is a Professor Emeritus in Liberal Arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Nancy Erroll French Lunning^[1] was born to Patricia McGrew and William French^[2] and graduated from Muscatine High School in 1968.^[3] She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Iowa and her Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Hamline University.^[4] In 2000, she received her PhD in Design, Housing and Apparel from the University of Minnesota;^[5] her dissertation Comic Books: Sex And Death At The Edge Of Modernity was supervised by Barbara E. Martinson.^[6] She became a professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1980, and she was director of their SES program from 1994 until 2010.^[7] She later became Professor Emeritus in Liberal Arts.^[8]

As an academic, Lunning specializes in anime and manga. She and Sandra Annett are the co-editors of Mechademia, an academic journal on Japanese popular culture;^[9] she alone was also the editor of the journal's first run from 2006 until 2015.^[10] In 2013, she published Fetish Style, a book on fetish fashion.^[11] In 2022, she wrote the book Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence.^[10] She has also served as the director of the Schoolgirls and Mobile Suits conference and its successor Mechademia Conference.^[12] She has also written chapters on object-oriented ontology.^[10]

Outside of academia, Lunning also worked in the film industry, as a costume designer and stage manager, and also as a producer for Moving Walkway Productions, a film production company specializing in music videos.^[12][13] She was a guest at KakkoiCon 2008 and AniMinneapolis 2011, two anime conventions in her local Minneapolis.^[10]

• Fetish Style (2013)
• Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence (2022)^[14][15][16]