Mechademia: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga and the Fan Arts published by the University of Minnesota Press.

While the focus of the journal is manga and anime, we see these not as objects but as arts whose production, distribution, and reception generate networks of connections. Thus our subject area extends from manga and anime to game design, fashion, graphics, packaging, and toy industries as well as a broad range of fan practices related to popular culture in Japan, including gaming, cosplay, fan artwork, anime music videos, anime improvisations, etc.

Mechademia solicits work not only from academics and critics but also from filmmakers, publishers, artists, and writers, so as to represent the full range of commentary available in this field.

For further information, see the Call for Papers on this web site.

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Senior Board:
Christopher Bolton (Associate Editor) (Submissions Editor) teaches Japanese literature and comparative literature at Williams College. He is co-editor of Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. You can find him at http://redcocoon.org.

Martha Cornog (Review and Commentary Editor) is a Philadelphia-based writer and researcher. Trained as a linguist and librarian, she has published extensive scholarly work in human sexuality, librarianship, and, more recently, graphic novels and cartooning. She has written several award-winning books on sexuality and libraries, and is a long time book reviewer for Library Journal, where she is graphic novels columnist. Together with her husband, Timothy Perper, she is Book Review and Commentary Editor for Mechademia. She is co-editor with him of a forthcoming book on graphic novels.

Thomas Lamarre (Associate Editor) is Professor of East Asian Studies and Associate in Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University. His books include Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirô on Cinema and Oriental Aesthetics (2005); Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription (2000); Impacts of Modernity (co-edited with Kang Nae-hui, 2003), as well as a recently completed book on anime and media entitled Difference in Motion. He works on the editorial boards of positions, Traces, and transtextes/transcultures.

Thomas Looser is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at New York University. He received his B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1979) and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from The University of Chicago (1999). Previously, he taught at McGill University, Canada and Emory University as an Assistant Professor in East Asian Studies. The author of many articles on Japan’s cultural and historical anthropology, cinema and new media, and globalization, Dr. Looser’s forthcoming book from the Cornell CEASS Series is entitled Visioning Eternity: Aesthetics, Politics, and History in the Early Modern Noh Theater. Works in progress include a co-authored book on anime and new media in Japan and a volume on Superflat art and 1990’s Japan.

Frenchy Lunning (Editor-in-Chief) received her doctorate from the University of Minnesota in Design Communications and Cultural Studies. She is a Professor of Liberal Arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Her work on American comic books and film led her to a discovery of anime and manga in the 1990’s and changed the focus of her studies. She is co-founder with Barbara Schulz of “SGMS: Schoolgirls and Mobilesuits: Culture and Creation in Manga and Anime,” an annual weekend workshop that features lectures from anime scholars, screenings, a Cosplay event and Fruits Basket Fashion Show (www.mcad.edu/anime ). She has written and lectured on the cultural implications and meanings of these works for a number of years before she founded Mechademia.

Hajime Nakatani is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at McGill University, where he teaches East Asian visual culture and theories of representation. Nakatani received a Ph.D. from University of Chicago in art history and cultural anthropology, and taught East Asian art at Rice University before joining the faculty at McGill.

Susan Napier is a Professor of Japanese at Tufts University. A specialist in Japanese literature and popular culture, especially anime, and also works on science fiction and film. She is the author of three books, “Escape from the Wasteland; Romanticism and Realism in the Works of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo,” “The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity,” and “Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle.” She is currently finishing a book on Japanese soft power in the West, entitled “From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Western Imagination.”

Abé Mark Nornes is an associate professor of Asian cinema at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Japanese Documentary Film: From the Meiji Era to Hiroshima and Forest of Pressure: Ogawa Shinsuke and Postwar Japanese Documentary (both Minnesota UP), as well as many articles in edited volumes and journals such as Cinema Journal and Film Quarterly. He co-edited Japan-American Film Wars (Routledge), In Praise of Film Studies (Kinema Club), and many film festival retrospective catalogs. Professor Nornes has also been a coordinator for the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival since 1990, where he programmed major retrospectives. His latest book, Cine-Babel, is on the on the role of translation in film history and is forthcoming from Minnesota UP.

Michelle Ollie (Associate Editor and Trends Editor) is the co-founder of The Center for Cartoon Studies (www.cartoonstudies.org) and professor of Marketing for New York Institute of Technology Graduate Business Program (www.nyit.edu). Ollie taught and was a director at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (www.mcad.edu). She currently lives in Vermont and is both faculty and COO at The Center for Cartoon Studies.

Timothy Perper (Review and Commentary Editor)
is a Philadelphia-based independent scholar. A biologist by training (PhD, CUNY, 1969), he has published extensively in the scholarly literature about human sexuality and romance for more than three decades. More recently, he and his wife, Martha Cornog, have been publishing scholarly work and reviews of manga and anime, especially about courtship and love, some of it to appear in Mechademia. He has been Book Review Editor for several scholarly journals, and together with Martha, he is Book Review and Commentary Editor for Mechademia. He is co-editor with her of a forthcoming book on graphic novels.

Mark J. P. Wolf is an Associate Professor in the Communication Department at Concordia University Wisconsin. He has a Ph. D. from the School of Cinema/Television at the University of Southern California, and his books include Abstracting Reality: Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age (2000), The Medium of the Video Game (2001), Virtual Morality: Morals, Ethics, and New Media (2003), The Video Game Theory Reader (2003), The World of the D’ni: Myst and Riven (2006), an upcoming book on video game history, and a novel for which he has begun looking for an agent. He is on the advisory board of Videotopia, and several editorial boards including those of Games and Culture and The Journal of E-media Studies. He lives in Wisconsin with his wife Diane and his sons Michael and Christian.

Wendy Siuyi Wong is the Chair of the Department of Design, Faculty of Fine Arts, York University. Dr. Wong has been conducting research in the area of Chinese and Hong Kong visual culture and history including graphic design, comics and advertising images over 16 years. She is the author of Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua (2002) published by Princeton Architectural Press, 4 books for Chinese readers, and numerous articles in academic and trade
journals. She served as a visiting scholar at Harvard University from 1999 to 2000, and was the 2000 Lubalin Curatorial Fellow at the Cooper Union School of Art. Wong is the recipient of the Asian Cultural Council Grant, an affiliate of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, in 1998. She has taught in the United States and Hong Kong before she moved to Canada.

Editorial Board:
Brent Allison
C.B. Cebulski
Patrick Drazen
Marc Hairston
Trish Ledoux
David Rapp
Brian Ruh
Theresa Winge

Advisory Board:
Pamela Gossin
John A. Lent
Nora Paul
Gilles Poitras
Lester Shen

Frenchy Lunning

Christopher Bolton
Thomas Lamarre
Michelle Ollie