Susan Jolliffe Napier (née Phelps; born October 1955) is a professor of the Japanese program at Tufts University.

She was formerly the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin.

[2][3] She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts,[4] graduated from Radcliffe College,[5] and obtained her A.B., A.M., and PhD degrees from Harvard University.

[9] In 1991, Napier published Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo.

[6] Napier first became interested in anime and manga when a student showed her a copy of Akira.