Posts filed under 'News'
October 13th’s Lantern carried an article by Katie Vitek about the Analyzing the Appeal of Manga Club (AAMC):OSU Student Club Explores Graphic Novels
October 28th’s Lantern has another article by Katie Vitek about the Cosplay Club:OSU Students Play Big Roles in Cosplay Club
I serve as faculty adviser for both clubs. AAMC was initiated by students who took my freshman seminar, Analyzing the Appeal of Manga. Many of the students in the Cosplay Club also are my former students. Moreover, the author of the two articles, Katie Vitek, also took the seminar in her freshman year. Congratulations to Katie for her great reporting! Also to Hillary Ash, Samantha Hall, Lea Schuffert, Sarah Smith, and everyone in AAMC, as well as to Katrina Webber, Brittany Pawlinski, Lauren Bills, and others in the Cosplay Club. You are contributing to the vibrant intellectual culture at Ohio State!
It is fun for me to watch students build on their interest in manga in different ways. Manga can be a source of inspiration for further research in many different fields. In that regard, there is a famous story that Honda’s efforts to develop a humanoid robot, Asimo, were inspired by Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy. Whatever the case, I’ll always be interested in hearing from former students who are pursuing their interest in manga in some way, even tangentially.
October 28th, 2009
Helen McCarthy was in Kuala Lumpur recently to give a talk about Tezuka Osamu. In KL she was interviewed by Elizabeth Tai of the Malaysia Star who wrote an article — Veteran Otaku: How did an English lady get hooked on a Japanese phenomenon some three decades ago?
OCLC’s new “Worldcat Identities” provides an overview of how widely Helen McCarthy’s books are collected in libraries worldwide. Many are at Ohio State, but not the newest one (yet).
This quarter Sarah Kniss, a senior at Ohio State, has been indexing McCarthy’s book. 500 Manga Heroes and Villains, on Carmenwiki to help improve access to the book, connect it with the manga in our collection, and encourage people to look more closely at characters in manga. That’s a great way to start doing research into manga. This is part of a larger project in which Sarah is exploring “professional writing” while promoting Ohio State’s manga collection.
March 8th, 2009
Hey! I’ll be teaching a course in spring quarter on “What is the Global Information Society?” with my colleague, Miriam Conteh-Morgan. I’ve just written a post about it on my Japanese Studies blog –
Spring Qtr: What Is the Global Information Society?
Syllabus is here: http://is.gd/wHrp
Manga is a good example, I think, of how information/knowledge functions in today’s “global information society.” I have been interested in this for some time, so that led to developing the course. In September 2008 I gave a paper, “Framing Knowledge: Global Youth Culture as Knowledge Society (Research in Progress)” that outlines my plans for further research into manga as global knowledge/information.
Of course, there are many other kinds of global information/knowledge. If you are interested in this kind of thing, please consider taking the course!
February 16th, 2009
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a front page article about Japanese anime tourists visiting the Washinomiya Shrine in Washimiya, Saitama Prefecture, because of its association with Lucky Star (らき★すた) by Yoshimizu Kagami (美水 かがみ). This caught my attention because Saitama is Ohio’s sister state in Japan!
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB121737740486095275.html?mod=weekend_leisure_arts_hs_coll_left
According to the English Wikipedia entry, the Washimiya fan tourism phenomenon was reported already a year ago in the English newspaper, Asahi Shimbun/ International Herald Tribune (18 August 2007), although that article is no longer on the web site.
The manga started coming out in 2005 and volume 6 will be out in September — if the Japanese Wikipedia is correct — the information there is more up-to-date than books.or.jp, which is my usual source. The Kadokawa web site does not yet list it.
I’m planning to order this for the manga collection soon.
July 30th, 2008
