Academic work in any field or area, including anime/manga studies, is not “for its own sake” – and the end goal of any academic project is a result or outcome that can be shared with the public. Of course, the actual process of knowledge sharing can take several different forms. Just some of them include books, chapters in edited essay collections, articles in a academic journal, presentations at conferences, stand-alone lectures, even just blog posts. So, if you are an academic who just finished a research project, how do you find the opportunities that may be available to you to share your work?
One straight-forward way (especially if your work is in the form of an article-length paper) is to identify journals that cover the subject, theme, topic or area of your research, and submit it for publication to one of them. Over the course of the research process, we become familiar with both the leading general journals in our research fields, and with others that are much more specialized. So, for example, someone who is studying the work of a particular anime director is likely already familiar with the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema – and can plan on submitting their paper to it. Similarly, a journal like Japan Forum or Japanese Studies would be a logical place to publish an examination of how anime/manga depict particular events in Japanese history, while a paper on representations of disability in manga can be presented to a journal such as Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry (as Andrea Wood did with Drawing disability in Japanese manga: Visual politics, embodied masculinity, and wheelchair basketball in Inoue Takehiko’s REAL).
However, this kind of approach has its own limitations. At the very basic, you the author may simply not be familiar with some of the journals that could potentially serve as outlets for your work. In fact, as studies such as Trends in publication outlets of geographer-climatologists and Where do educational technologists really publish? An examination of successful scholars’ publication outlets demonstrate, scholars in particular academic fields can publish in dozens of different journals. New journals appear frequently – Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, just announced a few days ago and set to publish its first volume next year may be of particular interest to scholars working with Japanese comics. Sometimes, journals may also announce special issues built around specific themes. And, of course, journals represent only one of the potential types of outlets that scholars have for sharing their work.
So, what kinds of resources can scholars draw on for identifying opportunities to publish their work in journals/essay collections or present it at academic conferences? There are several such resources that may be of interest to scholars who are interested in anime and manga.
University of Pennsylvania Department of English Call for Papers Website
CFP.English.UPenn.edu hosts and distributes announcements about upcoming publication/presentation opportunities in the humanities broadly defined. Announcements are categorized by subject (including “children’s literature”, “film and television”, and “popular culture”) and/or event type (“graduate conferences” and “international conferences”). The site offers basic keyword searching and the option to subscribe to RSS feeds for particular categories or “all recent posts”. Some of the recent announcements posted there that specify anime/manga as a potential subject include one for the Comics and Popular Culture Conference track of this year’s DragonCon, and another, for chapters in an upcoming “Undressing Sexual Taboo in the Liberal Arts” essay collection.
H-Announce: H-Net Academic Announcements
H-Announce is a general “distribution network for announcing events, upcoming conferences, calls for papers, calls for publication, programs, workshops, sources of funding, fellowships, and news”. As a project of H-Net, an international scholarly organization that has been in existence for more than 20 years, it has the benefit of being well-established – and therefore, recognized widely. The subject fields that can be used to categorize particular announcements are fairly specific, and include “film and film history”, “popular culture studies”, and “Asian history/studies”.
CFP List: Call for Papers Database
CFP List primarily collects announcements about upcoming conferences on languages and literature, including comics/graphic novels, but also includes a “film, TV and media” category, as well as “popular culture”, and a separate one for “world literatures” (with “Asian and Asian diasporas” as a sub-category).
Paperleap is a commercialized platform that both hosts announcements about upcoming calls for papers and offers organizers/editors access to various advanced features for managing their CFPs and gathering various metrics. Unlike the other two, its scope is not limited to any particular field or subject. Therefore, its content is skewed significantly towards engineering and natural science, and the sub-categories under “humanities”, such as “history”, “literature”, and “media”, are fairly broad as well.
In addition, beyond these major resources, several other, more specialized ones also frequently carry announcements that may be of interest to anyone working in anime/manga studies:
- Comics Research & Such Blog
- The Fan Studies Network
- Organization for Transformative Works Events Calendar
As always, I am sure there are plenty of other resources for scholarly “current awareness” that I am not familiar with. So, of course, suggestions for other resources to add to this short list are greatly appreciated!
Thank you! This is very helpful, especially as someone new to the field.