When thinking about the nature of anime and manga studies as a discreet subject area, it is certainly possible to raise a whole range of different questions. For example, in a chapter in the recent 2nd edition of the definitive essay collection Introducing Japanese Popular Culture, Mark McLelland highlights some of the unique challenges of “managing manga studies in the convergent classroom“. Similarly, in the latest version of the International Center for Japanese Studies report Japanese Studies Around the World (2024), Yoshikuni Igarashi presents an overview of “the state of manga studies in North America“. And, in the one of the leading journals in the broader Japanese Studies field, Ryotaro Mihara, in the provocatively-titled Decolonising anime studies: A prolegomenon makes the argument “that the field of Anglophone anime studies should itself be scrutinised in relation to how it canonises a specific ‘style of thought’ (as Said terms it) in understanding anime at the expense of anime itself”.

At the same time, even as we ask these kinds of questions about anime and manga studies, it is also crucial to ask other questions – that are not as much about general and abstract concepts as they are about the specific activities that we label “anime and manga studies”, primarily, teaching, and scholarly publications. Asking certain concrete questions lets us essentially operationalize the abstract concepts and treat “anime and manga studies” as something that can be not just defined, but itself studied.

One such question, perhaps one of the most straight-forward questions to ask about any new developing academic field, is simply how is new scholarship in the field actually published – in what formats, and by what publishers. Is the field dominated by just a small group of publishers? Or are publications dispersed among many? A prominent study that asks this question is The oligopoly of academic publishers in the Digital Era (PLoS, 2015). Critiques of the “oligopoly” are also frequent – one excellent example is the chapter by Paige Mann, Scholarship in a globalized world: The publishing ecosystem and alternatives to the Oligopoly, in the 2022 essay collection Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization Practical Tools for Improving Teaching, Research, and Scholarship (Rutgers University Press).

Very often, however, these types of studies emphasize only one kind or format of scholarly publication – the article in the peer-reviewed journal. And while this may be the “stereotypical” format for a scholarly publication – it is not the only possible one. In fact, in many areas in the humanities and social sciences, the edited essay collection that brings together several chapters on a particular common theme is at least as important and prominent as the journal article for presenting new research. And just looking at the list of English-language scholarly publications on anime and manga that appeared last year, it is clear that anime and manga studies is a field where the edited essay collection plays a major role – so far, I have been able to identify at least 37 individual chapters on topics related to anime/manga that appeared in unique collections, as well as 3 full collections (with a total of 40 chapters) specifically on anime/manga.

So, with all of this in mind, the question we can ask is, based on the most recent available information, which scholarly publishers actually consider publishing research on Japanese animation/Japanese comics?

And, based on the figures from 2025, the results are:

Right away, these numbers make it clear that different academic publishers are open to scholarly publications on anime and manga – both full essay collections like the three volumes that appeared last year (Anime, Religion, and Theology and Studio Ghibli Animation as Adaptations: Investigating How the Japanese Animation Powerhouse Reimagines Stories, both from Bloomsbury, and The Many Worlds of Takahata Isao from The University of Hawai’i Press), and single essays within collections that are not themselves specifically on anime/manga. The collection could be Horror Comics and Religion: Essays on Framing the Monstrous and the Divine (McFarland), or Law and Culture in Japan: Institutions, Justice, and Media (Emerald) – or even a something where a chapter on a topic related to manga would be rather unexpected – like The Routledge Handbook of Progressive Rock, Metal, and the Literary Imagination.

Of course, just by themselves, these numbers also do not mean very much. Presenting a more thorough analysis of the role of the edited essay collection in anime and manga studies and the role that different publishers play will involve expanding it across a range of years. But it is my hope that even just presenting this initial analysis can be a useful exercise – showing all of us who are currently in the field – or are looking to enter the field – the kinds of opportunities that we have access to.

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Suggestions for further reading:

Peter Webster, The Edited Collection: Pasts, Present and Futures. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

“[This volume]…explores the modern history of the edited collection and the particular roles it has played. It examines each component part of the critique, showing that they are either largely unfounded or susceptible of solution. It proposes the edited collection as a model of one possible idea of scholarly community: collaboration, trust, and mutual obligation in pursuit of a wider good.

Jalongo, Mary Renck. Contributing a chapter to a high-quality edited book: Recommendations for academic authors. Early Childhood Education Journal (forthcoming).

“At its best, the edited book is more than a compilation of individual chapters. It is a cohesive entity that not only deepens insights but also furthers readers’ understandings.”

Meyer, E. Nicole. A sign of the times: 21st-century edited collections. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 26(3), 257-266.

“This essay explores the notion of creating a cohesion of vision in contrast to the fragmentary narrative nature of edited volumes. How does this form of scholarship, which by its very nature contains gaps and silences, address crucial holes in current research? This seeming incompatibility seems particularly fitting to current unstable times, as we redefine what we consider as ‘normal.'”

Ossenblok, Tryuken L., & Engels, Tim C.E. Edited books in the Social Sciences and Humanities: Characteristics and collaboration analysis. Scientometrics, 104(1), 219-237.

“Monographs and edited books are important in scholarly communication, especially in the Social Sciences and Humanities…The article analyses various characteristics of edited books, i.e. the distribution over publishers, the places of publication, language use, the presence of introductions and conclusions, the occurrence of co-editorship and co-authorship, and the number of unique authors and book chapters per volume. Almost half of the edited books are published with about 5 % of the publishers.”

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