| Thesis Title: | Comic Books: Sex And Death At The Edge Of Modernity |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Barbara E. Martinson |
| Thesis Year: | 2001 |
| Discipline: | Popular culture |
| Sub Discipline: | Anime and manga |
| Workplaces: | Minneapolis College of Art and Design |
Nancy Erroll French Lunning[1] 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 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. In 2013, she published Fetish Style, a book on fetish fashion.[10] In 2022, she wrote the book .[11] She has also served as the director of the Schoolgirls and Mobile Suits conference and its successor Mechademia Conference. She has also written chapters on object-oriented ontology.
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.