For the first time, the program for this year’s Kumoricon anime convention, which will run from Friday, October 26 to Sunday, October 28 at the Oregon Convention Center is going to include a track of academic panels and lectures under the heading Kumoricon Anime and Manga Studies (KAMS). As described by its organizers, “KAMS is a new series of programming featuring academic panels and lectures, hosted at Kumoricon, with the goal of bringing together anime and manga scholars and fans and exposing the discipline’s insights to a larger audience of enthusiasts. Our 2018 presenters hail from 11 different universities from 3 different countries.”
The Call for Papers for KAMS was distributed starting in April of this year – the resulting program is as follows:
Kumoricon Anime and Manga Studies – Intertextual Anime
Friday, October 26
11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Why Anime and Manga Studies? – Roundtable
Roundtable of academics studying anime and manga discuss the discipline, its critical purpose, and its value in the classroom and in scholarship.
2:30 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Intertextual Anime – Roundtable
Roundtable discussion among KAMS panelists on the relationship between anime, manga, and other texts, the critical insights that can be gleaned from recognizing these connections, and its larger role in anime and manga studies.
Saturday, October 27
1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Intertextual Anime
- Manga’s Stylistic Influence on Cinema in the 1960s
Dr. Laura Lee (Modern Languages and Linguistics, Florida State University) - Spirit Princess and Snow Queen: The Soviet Roots of Princess Mononoke
Dr. Julia Alekseyeva (Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University) - Animating “sexy”, “cool”, and “pretty”: Intertextuality of “Yuri” in Yurikuma Arashi
Dr. Lien Fan Shen (Film & Media Arts, University of Utah)
3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Nation, Catastrophe, Dystopia
- The Lone NEET of the Apocalypse: The Hikikomori in Catastrophe and as Catastrophe
Evan Small (University of Southern California) - Database Nationalism: Nation, Nationalism, and Symbol in Japanese Pop Culture
Dr. Christopher Smith (Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Florida) - Gender and Survival in Dystopian societies in Psycho-pass and Homestuck
Olga Ilina (University of Tsukuba)
Sunday, October 28
10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Sociology of Anime Fandom
Ken Cai Kowalski (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Ryo Okazawa (University of Tokyo)
1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Alternative Approaches to Anime and Manga Studies
- The Modern Dramma per Musica: A Musical Semiotic Analysis of the AMV/MMV “Animal” and “In the Name of Love”
Christopher Hepburn (Texas Tech University) - The Structure of Moe: Towards a More Far Eastern Thinking
Raphael Chim (University College Dublin) - A War on Culture: Examining Cultural Imperialism Through the Japanese Anime Gintama
Leslie Frempong (Art Institute of Chicago)
[Ed. note: I am not directly involved with KAMS. However, one of the organizers has previously presented at the AX Anime and Manga Studies Symposium, which I organized.]