Nick Stember is a London-based translator and historian of Chinese literature and popular culture, currently employed as a post-doctoral researcher at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, where he is attached to the New East Asian Storytelling with Historical Dramas as Motor project (NØM), funded by the Velux Foundation, in collaboration with the University of Southern Denmark and The Animation Workshop at VIA University College, Viborg.

His research for NØM at the National Museum focuses on visual depictions of Daoist self-cultivation in comics, animations, video games, and other transmedia adaptations of xianxia or “immortal fantasy.”

In 2023 Nick 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, which he currently revising for publication as Paper Cinema: Global Sci-fi and Comic Books in Early Reform-era China (1978–1989).

In 2016 Nick 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, which can be read in its entirety online.

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!