Category: Programs


Jun
2025

Anime Expo 2025 Academic Program Schedule

categories: Anime Expo, Announcements, Programs

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.


Apr
2025

Online Symposium – Queer and Feminist Perspectives on Japanese Popular Cultures 2025

categories: Announcements, Programs

First announced at the end of 2023, and running successfully in April of last year, the online symposium Queer and Feminist Perspectives on Japanese Popular Cultures represents a major and exciting new stage in the development of Japanese popular culture studies as a vibrant academic field. The 2024 program brought together speakers from academic institutions in the U.S., Japan, Canada, Australia, UK, and several EU countries – and the event was free and open to all interested participants. Following up on the successful first year, this past February, its organizers launched the Call for Papers for the 2025 Symposium, and now, are able to present this year’s program!

The Queer and Feminist Perspectives on Japanese Popular Cultures Symposium 2025 will run from Monday, May 19 to Wednesday, May 21. It will be held primarily online, with details for one public lecture to be announced. The program is set to feature keynote addresses and public lectures from some of the leading scholars currently working in the field, as well as up to 20 individual presentations – once again representing a truly wide range of global approaches, methodologies, and viewpoints, addressing anime and manga (as well as anime/manga fan cultures), video games, uses of and interactions with social media, and popular culture more broadly. The Symposium is FREE, but registration is required. Before the Symposium starts, you will receive a link to view the actual speeches and presentations.

You can direct any questions about the Symposium to the organizers at popculturesjapan (at) gmail (dot) com. Support for the Symposium is provided by the Media, Gender, and Sexualities Group (University of Tokyo) and the Platform Lab (Concordia University).

And for my part, I would like to thank the organizers of the Symposium for their dedication and hard work, and wish them and every one of the participants in this year’s event the best of luck!

===

Queer and Feminist Perspectives on Japanese Popular Cultures Symposium 2025

Monday, May 19

9:00 p.m. (EDT) / Tuesday, May 20 – 10:00 a.m. (JST)
Panel Session: Mediating Gender
Chair: Megan Catherine Rose (UNSW Sydney)

  • Romantic Archetypes and the Ideology of Love in Otome Games
    Kelly Li (University of Sydney)
  • Kawaii as Contradiction: Gender Performativity and Embodied Resistance in Odottemita Dance Culture
    Zhaoyang Yang (University of Tokyo)
  • Afro/Japanese Placemaking: An Inquiry into Black Women’s Intimacies with Anime Characters
    Sarah-Anne Gresham (Rutgers University)

Tuesday, May 20

7:00 a.m. (EDT) / 8:00 p.m. (JST)
Keynote Address
Michelle Ho
Assistant Professor, Feminist and Queer Cultural Studies, National University of Singapore
Author of Emergent Genders: Living Otherwise in Tokyo’s Pink Economies (Duke U. Press, 2025)
Chair: Megan Catherine Rose (UNSW Sydney, University of Tokyo)

(more…)

Feb
2025

Japan Foundation New York Panel Discussion – Dragon Ball

categories: Announcements, Programs

When talking about Dragon Ball – the entire Dragon Ball franchise – it is simply hard to find words that will adequately describe its impact and influence in Japan and around the world. When its creator Akira Toriyama, passed away last year, the first sentence of the New York Times obituary was “His popular manga inspired numerous television, film and video game adaptations, reaching fans far beyond Japan’s borders.”

And now, the Japan Foundation New York has announced the latest event in its ongoing Japanese Popular Culture series of online panel discussions – the title for it will be Dragon Ball: How Black and Latin American Fans Found Themselves in This Anime.

Tuesday, March 4
7:00 p.m. EST
online – YouTube (registration required)

Featuring:

  • Dexter Thomas, writer and documentary filmmaker, Senior Fellow, Annenberg Innovation Lab

The discussion will be followed by a live question-and-answer session.

The Japanese Popular Culture series launched in the fall of 2020, with Why Do We Study Anime + Manga, and currently consists of almost two dozen individual events. Some of the others – all now archived on YouTube – have included:

Episode 5 (January 28, 2021): Sailor Moon: How These Magical Girls Transformed Our World

Episode 7 (April 29, 2021): Hayao Miyazaki: Children Entrusted with Hope

Episode 12 (December 16, 2021): Shoujo Manga: The Power and Influence of Girls’ Comics

Episode 19 (March 26, 2024): Leiji Matsumoto: Manga and Anime Legend of Sci-Fi and Beyond


Apr
2024

Online Symposium – Queer and Feminist Perspectives on Japanese Popular Cultures

categories: Announcements, Programs

The full schedule is now available for the upcoming online symposium Queer and Feminist Perspectives on Japanese Popular Cultures, organized by a team of scholars from Concordia University (Canada), UNSW Sydney (Australia) and Tulane University (USA), and supported by the Media, Gender and Sexualities Study Group (University of Tokyo). The goal of the symposium is to explore points of contact between Japanese popular culture broadly defined – including anime/manga, videogames, fashion, literature, and other fields and areas – and feminist studies, with an emphasis on issues of and intersections among gender, sexuality, race, queerness, disability, and class.

Over three days, the symposium will feature more than 20 speakers, representing institutions from the U.S., Canada, Australia, Italy, Japan, and other countries, as well as two keynote addresses. Emory University professor Erika Kanesaka, the creator of the website CuteStudies.com, will speak on the topic of “Cute and the Asian American experience”, and Laura Miller, the Eiichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Endowed Professor of Japanese Studies, University of St. Louis-Missouri, will speak to “Taking Girls Seriously”. Dr. Miller is the author of Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics (University of California Press, 2006) and co-editor of, among other titles, Manners and Mischief: Gender, Power, and Etiquette in Japan (University of California Press, 2011) and Modern Girls on the Go: Gender, Mobility, and Labor in Japan (Stanford University Press, 2013). Just some of the articles on Japanese popular culture she has written include Extreme makeover for a Heian-era wizard, Japan’s Cinderella motif: Beauty industry and mass culture interpretations of a popular icon, Behavior that offends: Comics and other images of incivility, and Rebranding Himiko, the shaman queen of ancient history.

The symposium is free, but registration is required, and a Zoom link will be sent to all individuals who register for the event.

April 15

5:30 p.m. – 6:45 p.m.
BL and queer studies

  • A utopian poetics of female observers inside/out in BL Manga
    Marianne Tarcov (McGill University)
    Emma Wang
  • Who put the ♂ in M♂M? Locating the breedable male body in shōshika BL
    Yoshika Han
    Jaclyn Zhou (University of California, Berkeley)
  • The bishōnen as void, and void again: Understanding Rio Kishida’s Summer Vacation 1999 through a framework of zero
    River Seager
(more…)

Mar
2024

‘Cats, Single Ladies, and Manga: Feminist Fantasies of Cohabitation in East Asian Discourses’ lecture

categories: Announcements, Programs

Over the past ten or so years, the Japanese program at Baruch College (City University of New York) has hosted a series of mini-seminars and talks by individual speakers on topics related to Japanese animation and comics. The series started in 2015 with Globalized Manga Culture and Fandom and continued with Alt Manga: Alternative Manga Symposium (April 2016), Manga/Comics and Translation (April 2017), Manga/Comics against Human Trafficking (April 2018), and, in 2019, Untold History of Japanese Comics: Prewar and LGBTQ+ Manga. And, after an understandable hiatus, it has continued, with the latest one scheduled for next week.

The speaker, Dr. Grace En-Yi Ting is an assistant professor in the gender studies programme, The University of Hong Kong, and author of, among other publications, the essay The desire and disgust of sweets: Consuming femininities through shōjo manga (U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal) and the Gender, manga, and anime chapter in the Routledge Companion ot Gender and Japanese Culture. Entitled Cats, Single Ladies, and Manga: Feminist Fantasies of Cohabitation in East Asian Discourse, the talk is an examination of Japanese popular culture’s approach to themes of “heteronormative pressures regarding marriage and reproduction”, as expressed in particular in the manga The Masterful Cat is Depressed Again Today and its 2023 anime adaptation.

Thursday, April 4
12:50 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Baruch College
55 Lexington Ave, VC-4-165
New York, NY 10010)

The talk is open to members of the Baruch community and the general public, but registration is required. Additional details and the registration link are available on the Baruch Japanese Program website.


Dec
2023

Call for Papers: Queer and Feminist Perspectives on Japanese Pop

categories: Announcements, Call for Papers, Programs

Abstract Submission Deadline:
February 1

Notification of Acceptance:
February 15

Dates: Mid-April, 2024 (dates tbc)
Format: Online (Zoom)
In order to facilitate multiple timezones, the event will start at 8am EST/9pm JST

Organizers:

– Aurélie Petit, Concordia University, Canada
– Megan Catherine Rose, UNSW Sydney, Australia
– Edmond Ernest dit Alban, Tulane University, United States of America

Supported by:

Media, Gender, and Sexualities Study Group (The University of Tokyo)

We invite scholars, researchers, activists, and practitioners from around the world to participate in a multidisciplinary two-day exploration of the intersection between Japanese popular cultures and intersectional, trans-inclusive feminist studies. During this symposium we will explore the convergence of gender, sexuality, race, queerness, disability and class. We aim to provide a platform for critical discussions about gender and Japanese animation, fashion, video games, literature and digital cultures. In doing so we hope to encourage new directions in feminist approaches to Japanese popular cultures.

Symposium Themes:

We welcome papers that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

  • Genre and gender

We encourage papers that seek to move beyond gender binaries, in which “men” and “women” are generalize into monolithic categories of preferences, attitudes and ideologies. We would love to see papers that account for gender diversity, or instances where marginalized groups who move outside these paradigms are included. We encourage papers that open up and challenge assumptions that underpin gendered audiences.

  • Lived-experiences

We seek input and leadership from lived-experience experts on matters of equity, inclusion and justice for marginalized communities (e.g. sex workers, gender diverse people, disabled people, survivors) in relation to Japanese popular cultures. We call for vulnerable voices to be centered in all accounts of “big” ethical dilemmas studies of Japanese culture grapple with. We especially encourage applications from scholars who wish to reflect on their own positionality within the field of feminist Japanese studies

  • Feminism and femininities

Up until fourth wave feminism, gender presentation and the body has been a contested site of debate,colonization and control. We invite contributions that explore ways we can free the body through queer beauty discourses and re-direct feminist activism towards structural change in Japanese popular cultures. We also call for examinations of feminist activism within media industries and the challenges encounteredthroughout the years.

  • Gendered platform-interactions

Here, we invite contributions that explore the role online platforms have played in shaping Japanese popularcultures. Which gendered history have platform-centered approaches perpetuated throughout the years? Which exclusionary practices towards gender-diverse people have been facilitated by social media platforms?

===

Submission Guidelines:

Abstracts should be between 250-300 words (title included) and clearly outline the research question, methodology, findings, and relevance to the conference themes.

Submissions must be written in English

Please include a brief biography (50-100 words) along with your submission, as well as the time zone you will be joining us from.

Submissions can be made by email at popculturesjapan@gmail.com, and the full Call for Papers is additionally available at https://t.co/Ltr9MuJiAA

Participation and attendance is free of charge.

The symposium will be held online over two days, in order to accommodate participants in different time zones.


Nov
2023

Roundtable – Welcome to Anime/Manga Studies

categories: Announcements, Programs


TUESDAY, November 21
2:00 p.m. (Eastern time)
https://tinyurl.com/mvzedsxm (Zoom)

– Ever thought about writing a college paper on themes and images in Attack on Titan?
– Wanted to take a class on the history of girls’ manga?
– Are intrigued by a book on the many different ways that Japanese manga authors have adapted characters and images from Alice in Wonderland?

Just curious about what “anime and manga studies” even means?

Anime and Manga Studies Projects presents a live interactive discussion introducing the idea of scholarly approaches to Japanese comics and animation and the academic field of anime/manga studies.

  • What is anime and manga studies
  • What do we want to accomplish by approaching anime/manga this way?
  • What kinds of questions can we ask?
  • Who participates in this field
  • What themes and topics are anime/manga scholars interested in exploring?
  • Do I need to be a college professor to participate
  • Do I need to be a Japanese studies scholar to participate

For this discussion, a group of leading anime/manga scholars, from different backgrounds, and at different stages in their careers will share their thoughts, opinions, and experiences.

And we will be happy to answer any questions you may have – about how we chose this field, what exactly we do, and why – and how you too can join us!

Featuring:

Prof. Brent Allison
Social Foundations & Leadership Education
University of North Georgia

Prof. Mimi Okabe
Japanese Cultural Studies
University at Buffalo

author of
Manga, Murder and Mystery: The Boy Detectives of Japan’s Lost Generation

Zoe Crombie
PhD candidate, Film Studies
Lancaster University

Moderator: Mikhail Koulikov
(Executive Producer, Anime and Manga Studies Projects)

Have any questions you would like to ask the speakers, topics you want to see us talk about, issues you feel we need to discuss?

Please send your suggestions to mik@animemangastudies.com!


Nov
2023

Japan Foundation Presents – Mecha-Anime

categories: Announcements, Programs

In Anime: A Critical Introduction, Rayna Denison uses the phrases “a cultural phenomenon” and “a sliding, shifting category of media production” to describe Japanese animation. When we think about anime this way, it’s also only natural to consider different genres within anime – one of the most iconic is “mecha” – in the definition that Giuseppe Gatti succinctly provides – “narratives of giant robots piloted by a human within”.

Mecha anime first appeared in the 1970’s, and the genre then evolved in several different directions. Some of the most well-known Japanese animation films and television series of the last several decades belong to the genre, and every year, at least several others try to expand its possibilities. And, for that matter, it is also no surprise that mecha has also attracted a significant amount of scholarly interest – just some examples are essays such as Between the child and the mecha – a reading of the anime series Rahxephon as “an allegory of Lacan’s landmark description of the three stages of subject development”, and “Peace through understanding”: How science-fiction anime Mobile Suit Gundam 00 criticizes US aggression and Japanese passivity.

And now, on November 10, as a part of the Kotatsu Japanese Animation Festival 2023, the Japan Foundation, London is hosting animation journalist and scholar Ryota Fujitsu who will present a lecture on the history of mecha, the way the genre’s features have developed over the years, and some of drivers for these developments.

Friday, November 10, 2023
1:30 p.m. (Eastern time)
REGISTRATION

FUJITSU Ryota is one of Japan’s leading animation critics. He has lectured in the Animation Studies program at Tokyo Polytechnic University, and served as a programming advisor for the Animation Section of the Tokyo International Film Festival. His publications include アニメ「評論家」宣言 / Anime Hyoronka Sengen (Anime Critic’s Declaration), Tokyo: Fusosha, 2003, チャンネルはいつもアニメ――ゼロ年代アニメ時評 / Channeru wa Itsumo Anime: Zero Nendai Anime Jihyō (We’ve Been Watching Anime All the Time, When We Sit in Front of TV!), Tokyo: NTT Shuppan, 2010, a collection of personal reflections and notes on television anime in the years from 2000 to 2010, and アニメと戦争 / Anime to sensō (Anime and War), Tokyo: Nippon Hyoron sha, 2021.


Jul
2022

Mechademia June 2022 – Migration and Transition

categories: Programs

When in 2001, the Minneapolis College of Art & Design hosted a “Weekend Intensive study in the culture and creation of Japanese Manga (Comics) and Anime (Animation)” under the title Schoolgirls & Mobilesuits, it was one of the first events of its kind anywhere in the world. In the more than 20 years that have passed since, the idea of an academic workshop or symposium on anime/manga is no longer particularly novel, and that first SGMS event gave rise to Mechademia, a series of annual conferences held first at MCAD, and later, in several locations in South Korea and Japan. The Mechademia conferences also played a significant role in the launch in 2006 of Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga and the Fan Arts, which was then published for 10 issues, went on hiatus, and has since returned as Mechademia: Second Arc, with a twice-yearly publication schedule and a more expanded subject focus.

As was the case with most live events, Mechademia did not take place in either of the last two years, but returned last month, though with a major change in location to Los Angeles, to more closely co-incide with Anime Expo, the largest anime convention in the U.S., also returning live after after a two-year-break. And, although it has now been several weeks since Mechademia 2022, I think it’s important to preserve and present the schedule for this year, even as a guide to the range of subjects and topics that an event of its kinds and scope could cover, and the speakers it attracted.

Mechademia 2022 – Migration and Transition

Tuesday, June 28

10:00 a.m. – Panel 1
Definitions and Delineations

Transcultural Perspectives on Moe: Fan Theories, Discourses
Paul Ocone (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)

Rise of the Weeaboo: Differentiating Japanese Otaku from Global Anime and Manga Fans
Ana Matilde Sousa (CIEBA – Artistic Studies Research Center, University of Lisbon)

10:00 a.m. – Panel 2
Outsiders: Assimilations and Erasures

‘Time is the Last Sacred Territory’: Tenuous Temporalities and Ainu Erasure in Naoko Takeuchi’s Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
Taylor Janeen Pryor (Cornell University)

Glimpses of the Gaikokujin: Engaging with the ‘Outsider’ in Modern Manga
Ananya Saha (Assistant Professor, English, St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata)

1:00 p.m. – Panel 1
Dislocated Identities

I Love, Therefore I Am: Dismantling the Cartesian Dichotomy and Unifying the Self in Ghost in the Shell
Maria Grajdian (Associate Professor, Media Studies and Cultural Anthropology, Hiroshima University)

Society Eats Their Own: The Transnational Image of the Cannibal
Wendy Goldberg (Lecturer, Composition & Rhetoric, University of Mississippi) (more…)


May
2022

‘Manga in a Postdigital Environment’ Symposium

categories: Programs

On May 30-31, Universida de Vigo, Pontevedra Campus, will host an international academic symposium entitled Manga in a Postdigital Environment. The symposium, organized by the research group DX5 is open to the public, and also will be broadcast online via Zoom. For additional information, including registration instructions, please contact grupodx5@uvigo.es.

The full program will consist of 12 individual presentations, with speakers from a number of leading European and Japanese universities, representing the cutting edge of global manga studies. For more details, including abstracts of the presentations and further details about the speakers, please see full symposium program.

Monday, May 30

10:00 a.m. – Opening Remarks

– Jorge Soto (Vice-Rector, Pontevedra Campus, Universidade de Vigo)
– Ana Soler (Director, dx5 Research Group)
– Jose Andres Santiago (Symposium Coordinator)

10:15 a.m.
From Cover to Page. From Title to the Speech Balloon: An Analysis of Typographic Applications in Naruto and Bleach
– Jose Andres Santiago (Universidade de Vigo)
– Tatiana Lameiro Gonzalez (Universidade de Vigo) (more…)