In three weeks, starting on July 3, Anime Expo, the largest Japanese animation and comics convention in the U.S., will once again return to the Los Angeles Convention Center. The AX 2025 schedule is packed with dozens of talks, presentations, premieres, guest appearances, company announcement sessions, and other live events. And, as it has for fifteen years now, though with some breaks (including for when AX itself was cancelled due to COVID), the Anime Expo live programming schedule will include a full Academic Program track – a unique opportunity for anyone who will be at the convention to sit in on one or more scholarly lectures and panel discussions on different aspects of anime and manga. This year, AX itself is organized around an “Academia” theme, and “Academics” is also the general topic for the Academic Program. When the Call for Papers for it was distributed earlier this year, some of the possible suggested topics that speakers were invited to consider included:
- ways that anime and manga present or interpret knowledge and education, as well as classroom settings
- specific educational/instructional uses of anime and manga
- tools, techniques, methodologies, and trends in anime/manga research.
For 2025, the Academic Program is officially known as JAMS@AX Symposium, presented as a partnership between Anime Expo and the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies.
The full program for JAMS@AX Symposium 2025 consists of:
Thursday, July 3
10:00 a.m.
Keynote Address – Anime Goes to College
Emilie Waggoner (University of Colorado)
Emilie Waggoner is the Director of First Year Student Experiences at the University of Colorado Denver, where she teaches the unique course “Anime Goes To College: Analyzing Anime Characters Through a Sociological Lens”, as well as several others. She recently published Isekai as a Reflection of College Student Transition Theory (Popular Culture Review, Fall 2024), and is completing a EdD program in Leadership for Educational Equity.
11:30 a.m.
Performing Girlhood: Princesses, Cosplay, and Identity in Anime
- Magical Girl Operation: Costume & Cosplay in Witch Hat Atelier
- Azumanga Daioh and “Nichijou”: Absurdity and the Japanese Schoolgirl
- The functional view in the constructed family: Animation as a Tool to Redefine the Concept of Family in Spy x Family
- Floating Castles, Staged Narratives: Genre Conventions and Gender in Revolutionary Girl Utena
1:00 p.m.
Music of Studio Ghibli
David Lopez, Elliott Jones, John Marr (Santa Ana College)
Friday, July 4
10:00 a.m.
Family Bonds and Queer Community: Finding Acceptance, and Oneself, in Anime
- Ace in Practice: Uta Isaki’s Manga and the Production of Asexual Identity
- Can I Get An Amen?: Teaching English and Queer Acceptance in Japan via RuPaul’s Drag Race in Until We’re Together
- Henshin Dekinai: The Doomed Queen is Doomed No More
- Beyond School Walls: Queer Families and Self-Acceptance in Hinowa Kozuki’s Elegant Yokai Apartment Life
11:30 a.m.
Monstrous Lessons: Teaching Horror Anime
- Horror and Transformation: A Curriculum Exploring Junji Ito
- Designing an Anime Studies Syllabus: Teaching Monstrosity and Tolerance
- Cataloguing the Creepy: Japanese Anthology Horror and Its Connection to Literary History
1:00 p.m. – Educator Roundtable
Saturday, July 5
10:00 a.m.
Worlds of Knowledge: Anime’s Keepers of Discovery
- Frieren and the Value of Inquiry
- The Guardians of the Louvre: How Manga Mythologizes Museums
- Anime as Information: Mapping the Resources of Anime and Manga Studies
- Anime Music Academia: Reborn as a music theory student with unlimited potential
11:30 a.m.
Pirates, Ecology, and K-Pop – How Anime Explores Worlds and Cultures
- Teaching Culture Analysis and Anthropological Research through One Piece and the Fantasy-Journey Setting in Anime/Manga
- Wagyu with a Fenrir: The Instructive Evasion of Ecology in Campfire Cooking in Another World
- Anime’s Korean Wave: The Rise of South Korean IP in Japanese Animation
1:00 p.m.
Physics of Anime
All of the Academic Program sessions will be held in Los Angeles Convention Center Room 411.
You can view an archive of previous years’ schedules and speaker biographies on the AX website.