The Author

Kristine Michelle “Khursten” Santos is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History and Japanese Studies Program at Ateneo de Manila University. Her areas of study include gender, cultural history focused on queer and youth cultures in Asia. 

She has written and presented on queer works and boys love culture for various conferences and academic publications. Her latest publications are “Queer Affective Literacies: Examining “Rotten” Women’s Literacies in Japan” in Critical Arts titled “The Bitches of Boys Love Comics: The Pornographic Response of Japan’s Rotten Women” published at the journal Porn Studies.

Outside of academia, she has been actively writing about manga and Japanese culture on her website, Otaku Champloo, since 2006. Her endless rambling about manga led to contributions to websites such as mangabookshelf.com (Banana Fish Roundtable). Her engagement with popular culture inspired her to develop a career in research surrounding  media cultures in the region.

This website, punkednoodle.com, is a personal website that features her love of travel and food. Sometimes, she also likes public lectures on food history.

For more information about her research, visit her Academia.edu profile.

When Khursten is not studying manga, she challenges her palate by hunting for awesome restaurants or cooking a new recipe. When called for a conference, she takes time to enjoy her travel a bit before jetlag disrupts her body rhythm altogether. She also loves BL. She is a fujoshi.