Category: Call for Papers


Apr
2016

Call for Papers – Princess Mononoke, 20th Anniversary

categories: Call for Papers

Princess MononokeFor many people in the U.S, their first experience with Japanese animation took place in 1999, when Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke played in some 130 theaters around the country. Since then, it has become one of the most recognizable examples of anime, and film programs and classes on Japanese cinema in general and on anime in particular include it pretty much as a matter of course. Scholars have also been paying attention to it pretty much from right after its release – with Susan Napier’s 2001 Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation, and more than a dozen essays in various journals and edited collections – some of these include Between the worlds: Liminality and self-sacrifice in Princess Mononoke (Journal of Religion and Film), Animating child activism: Environmentalism and class politics in Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke (1997) and Fox’s Fern Gully (1992) (Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies) and National identity (re)construction in Japanese and American animated film: Self and other representation in Pocahontas and Princess Mononoke (Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies). A full list of these is available in the Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli Bibliography that I also maintain/edit.

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Feb
2016

Call for Papers: AX 2016 Anime and Manga Studies Symposium

categories: Anime and Manga Studies Symposium, Announcements, Call for Papers

axlogo_2016_date_blackAs many of you know, one of the major projects that I am involved with annually is developing, organizing/producing, and managing the AX Anime and Manga Studies Symposium, also known as the Academic Program track of Anime Expo, the largest anime convention in the U.S. Every year, the Symposium brings together a select group of academics, graduate students, undergraduates, and independent scholars who present their research on a wide range of topics related to anime/manga directly to AX’s attendees.

The Call for Papers for this year’s Symposium is now open. It will be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center from July 1 to July 4. If you would like to be considered for participation as a speaker, please review the CFP, and submit your proposal (300 words maximum) to me at mkoulikov@gmail.com. The proposal submission deadline is April 15. And, you are welcome (and encouraged) to pass it along to anyone who you think may be interested in speaking on the program or attending!

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Call for Papers
AX 2016 Anime and Manga Studies Symposium
Anime Expo 2016
July 1-4 | Los Angeles, CA
www.anime-expo.org
www.anime-expo.org/academic-program

The Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation, the parent organization of Anime Expo (AX), the largest anime convention in the U.S., is inviting proposals for plenary addresses, presentations, and panel discussions for the 2016 AX Anime and Manga Studies Symposium. The Symposium will be held from July 1 to July, 2016 at the Los Angeles Convention Center (Los Angeles, California) as the Academic Program track of this year’s Anime Expo.

Japanese animation (anime) and comics (manga) are unique forms of visual culture that attract and inspire audiences around the world. The AX Anime and Manga Studies Symposium serves as the premier site for presenting and sharing research on a wide range of topics related to the creation, production, distribution, and worldwide reception of anime/manga, their history, relationships with other media, and the experiences and practices of anime and manga fans.

The Symposium’s goal is to bring together a diverse, international group of scholars, and facilitate the development of anime/manga studies as a defined academic field. As an integral part of Anime Expo, and open to all attendees, it also introduces general audiences to the methods, practices and tools of academic research into popular culture and fosters a dialogue between academics and fans. Participants in the Symposium will be able to join a celebration and appreciation of Japanese popular culture and interact directly with the convention’s attendees. Inherently interdisciplinary, it is open to approaches from different fields, and welcomes a wide range of speakers. Early-career scholars, graduate students, undergraduates, and independent researchers/industry professionals are especially encouraged to submit proposals!

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Dec
2015

Call for Papers – 桜SGMS: Mechademia Conf. on Asian Popular Cultures

categories: Call for Papers

Aoyama Gakuin University
Tokyo, Japan
March 18-20

MechademiaThe organizers of the Mechademia Conference on Asian Popular Culture annual conference, held at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design annually since 2001 (originally as Schoolgirls and Mobilesuits) are now accepting presentation and panel proposals for the Mechademia Conference on Asian Popular Cultures 2016, to be hosted in Tokyo, Japan (at Aoyama Gakuin University), from March 18 to March 20, 2016.

The theme of the conference is “Conflicts of Interest in Anime, Manga and Gaming”. There is no formal list of potential or suggested topics, but the organizers describe its theme as follows:

“After the initial period of explosive expansion and innovation in the arts of Japanese anime, manga, and gaming in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a new era has arrived in which the effects of that massive emergence and expansion have begun to appear in, on, and around the surface of those arts, in the form of conflicts, ambiguities, controversies, disappointments, as well as stunning opportunities and innovation. These cracks on the smooth surface of this global phenomenon may in fact be the ‘stretch marks’ of its rapid global growth.

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Dec
2015

Call for Papers – Communicating with Cool Japan: New Int’l Perspectives on Japanese Popular Culture

categories: Call for Papers

Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan)
June 8, 2016

conf2016Scholars at all levels, including graduate students, are invited to submit papers and panel proposals for “Communicating With Cool Japan”, a one-day pre-conference that will be held immediately preceding the 66th annual conference of the International Communication Association. Submissions on any topic related to Japanese popular culture are specifically encouraged.

Some of the potential themes and issues that the Call for Papers highlights include:

  • production processes and/or cultural workers
  • political economy (including the role of the state and markets)
  • media/cultural content (e.g. of anime, manga, fashion, videogames, film, music, television, etc.)
  • the Internet, social/online media, cellular phones, or other technology
  • uses of Japanese popular culture
  • globalization or diaspora
  • cultural policy/diplomacy
  • consumption or media effects
  • identity and the self
  • otaku and fandom

Submissions of up to 200 words for both individual papers and discussion sessions/panels are accepted until January 31, 2016, and speakers will notified of acceptance shortly thereafter.

Communicating with Cool Japan is being organized by Dr. Casey Brienza (City University London) and Dr. Anamik Saha (Goldsmiths, University of London). It will feature a keynote address by Prof. Koichi Iwabuchi (Monash University), the director of the Monash Asia Institute, best known as the author of Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2002)

Dr. Brienza is the editor of the essay collection Global Manga: “Japanese” Comics without Japan? and the author of of the forthcoming monograph Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese Comics, as well as more than twenty book chapters and journal articles on different aspects of the Japanese comics industry and manga’s worldwide impact and reception, such as Books, not comics: Publishing fields, globalization, and Japanese manga in the United States (Publishing Research Quarterly, 2009), Remembering the future: Cartooning alternative life courses in Up and Future Lovers (The Journal of Popular Culture), and Beyond B&W? The global manga of Felipe Smith (in the Eisner Award-winning essay collection Black Comics: The Politics of Race and Representation (Bloomsbury, 2013) as well as several influential papers on emerging trends in scholarly publishing.

Communicating with Cool Japan – full CFP and additional details

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Nov
2015

Call for Papers – Transnational Comics: Crossing Gutters, Transcending Borders

categories: Call for Papers

University of Florida (Gainesville, Florida)
April 8-10, 2016

The Call for Papers for the upcoming 13th University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels is now open. The theme of the conference is “Transnational Comics: Crossing Gutters, Transcending Boundaries”, and the list of suggested topics specifically includes “Comics that have been translated and/or disseminated across countries (for example, the translation and reception of manga and bande dessinée in the US)”, as well as a number of others, such as “comics that deal with border-crossings” and “the effect of globalization on comics industries” that can include Japanese comics.

Proposal maximum length: 300 words
Submission deadline: January 15, 2016

Send proposals to anujamadan@ufl.edu

The program of this year’s 12th Conference, “Comics Read but Seldom Seen: Diversity and Representation in Comics and Related Media” included a dedicated session on “Representation in anime & manga”, consisting of:

“The existence of emotion is nothing but a burden:” Emotional repressions as (re)presentations of psychological disorders in anime and manga
– Kathy Nguyen, Texas Woman’s University

Queer cooking: Fumi Yoshinaga and queer existence in modern Japan
– Andrew John Smith, Indiana University of Pennsylvania)

Yamete kudasai! Romanticized rape, humiliated homosexuality: A deconstruction of patriarchal values in yaoi and gay manga
– Janardana Hayton, Florida State University

See below for the full Call for Papers.

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Sep
2015

Call for Papers – Traumics: Comics Narratives of Trauma

categories: Call for Papers

The academic journal ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies is currently inviting papers for an upcoming “Traumics: Comics Narrative of Trauma” special issue of the journal. The CFP specifically mentions “Trauma and manga” as a potential suggested topic, with the works of Osamu Tezuka and Moto Hagio as possible examples. Submissions from faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and independent scholars are welcomed. The deadline for submissions is November 1, and papers must be between 6,000 and 10,000 words. Additional information about the journal, its review process, and specific formatting guidelines is available at Submissions.

Published by the University of Florida Department of English (which offers a PhD with a track in “comics and visual rhetoric”), since its first Spring 2005 issue, this open-access journal has featured several papers on topics related to Japanese comics, including The queering of Haruhi Fujioka: Cross-dressing, camp, and commoner culture in Ouran High School Host Club (Summer 2009), Shakespeare Manga: Early- or Post-Modern? (Winter 2013) and Erotic grotesque redemption: Transgressive sexuality and the search for salvation in Katsuya Terada’s The Monkey King Volume 1 (2015), as well as a full “Anime and Utopia” special issue. The department also hosts an annual Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels; “Traumics: Comic Narratives of Trauma” was the theme of last year’s 11th Annual Conference

Additional Details: (more…)


Sep
2015

Call for Papers – 30 Years of Studio Ghibli

categories: Call for Papers

Aug
2015

Call for Papers – ‘Asian Popular Culture’

categories: Call for Papers

Journal of Popular CultureThe Journal of Popular Culture, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that is an official publication of the Popular Culture Association is currently accepting papers for an upcoming special issue on Asian popular culture. The CFP notes that “‘Asian popular culture’ has become synonymous with the ideas, images, and phenomena of East Asia and specifically with Japanese animation and Chinese martial arts cinema”, and aims to expand the scope of the special issue very broadly in terms of both geography (East, Southeast, and South Asia) and topics, such as film, television, music, literature, sports, videogames, youth culture, and fan activities in general.

The Journal of Popular Culture has been published since 1967. Over the years, it has consistently welcomed scholarship on anime/manga. Just some of the articles that have appeared in it include Adams, Kenneth Alan & Hill, Lester, Protest and rebellion: Fantasy themes in Japanese comics (1991); Grigsby, Mary, Sailormoon: Manga (comics) and anime (cartoon) superheroine meets Barbie: Global entertainment commodity comes to the United States (1998), Ito, Kinko, A history of manga in the context of Japanese culture and society (2005), Madeley, June M., Transnational transformations: A gender analysis of Japanese manga featuring unexpected bodily transformations, and, just earlier this year, Maser, Verena, Nuclear disasters and the political possibilities of shōjo (girls’) manga (comics): A case study of works by Yamagishi Ryōko and Hagio Moto. Because of its history and status, it can comfortably be considered one of the highest-profile and most prestigious venues for English-language academic writing on Japanese animation/Japanese comics.

The deadline for submissions is December 31, 2015, and papers must be between 5,000 and 7,500 words. (more…)


Apr
2015

Call for Papers – ‘Animation/Anime’

categories: Call for Papers

Midwest Popular Culture Association/Midwest American Culture Association
2015 Annual Conference
Cincinnati, OH (October 1-4, 2015)

The Midwest Popular Culture Association/Midwest American Culture Association seeks proposals for papers and panels on animation and anime for its 2015 Conference, to be held Thursday–Sunday,1-4 October 2015 at the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza in Cincinnati, OH.  The conference seeks papers on Western animation, Japanese animation (anime), and animation from other cultures.  As animation and anime cover all kinds of storytelling, topics may include but are not limited to the following suggestions:

  • Social and political themes in animation and anime (environmentalism, gender roles, ethnic and cultural stereotypes, political corruption, etc.)
  • Using animation and anime in the classroom
  • Genres of (and in) animation and anime (love and romance, fantasy, horror, erotica, science fiction, crime and mystery, historical dramas, etc.)
  • Ethical criticism of animation and anime
  • History of animation and anime
  • Comedy, parody, and pastiche in animation and anime
  • Creating and producing animation and anime (adapting books and manga, visual styles, music, voice casting, translating and subtitling, etc.)

Please send submissions directly to http://submissions.mpcaaca.org. Full details are available on the official CFP at http://mpcaaca.org/cincy-2014/2015-cfp/. Graduate students are invited to apply for one of the MPCA/ACA’s competitively awarded travel grants at http://mpcaaca.org/conference/travel-grants/.

Abstract/proposal submission deadline: April 30
Subject Area Chair: Prof. Mark Gellis (Kettering University)


Mar
2015

Call for Proposals – “Critical Approaches to Comics Artists – Osamu Tezuka”

categories: Call for Papers

UPM LogoThe University Press of Mississippi has consistently been one of the most active publishers of English-language scholarship on comics, including manga. UPM is now accepting proposals for books in a series of collections of “original, multidisciplinary essays by established and emerging scholars on a major cartoonist or graphic novelist.” And, one of the cartoonists/graphic novelists that the call for proposals specifically identifies as being of interest is “God of Manga” Osamu Tezuka. (more…)