Lani Alden is a PhD Candidate at the University of California at Berkeley in Japanese studies. She is also obtaining two designated emphases. The first is in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the second is in New Media Studies.

Her current research focuses on the ways in which bodies that trouble or confound, particularly bodies on the stage, are rendered in various emerging media forms in modern Japan (particularly the early 20th and mid-late 19th centuries), as well as how the subjects of said media-tion speak both on and against the very media forms they are placed within.

She also has attendant interests in fan and audience studies, audio studies, digital humanities, photography, podcasts, and audio drama. From time to time she also develops software for Japanese research. In addition to having developed hundreds of university websites to date, she has developed computerised tools to assist with reading kuzushiji, automate research across many databases, enable better interaction on sites like JapanKnowledge, ocr and search texts, enable windows-exclusive database programs to work for Mac and Linux, and display kanbun via html/css.