This week, my home university, Wilfrid Laurier Univeristy, is partnering with the University of Waterloo to host Canada's major humanities conference, the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Basically, all the individual national scholarly organizations -like mine, the Film Studies Association of Canada- get together an hold their ( Read more... )

People who don't know any academics seem to think that once classes end, professors get the summers "off" to sit around smoking pipes and reading arcane books on useless subjects. This is not at all true.(Pipes! As if.) Between committees, conference papers, meetings, and fieldwork prep, today is the first day in two weeks where I can honestly say ( Read more... )

Woo, I'm excited! In a fit of initiative, I've finally created an account at Dreamwidth and I think I've configured everything to cross-post. This is the test. If you're an LJ friend of mine who's also on DW and you want me in your Circle, you can find me t/here as "sanet." I'm doing my best to add you if we're already mutual LJ friends and I know ( Read more... )

Now that teaching is done and professional service is almost done, I'm finally getting back into concentrated anime research. And at the top of my pile (along with Mechademia 6, review coming eventually) is Marc Steinberg's new book Anime's Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. I have to say off the top that this book is mainly ( Read more... )

Broadcasting live from the heart of Grading Country, it's The Merin Minute, reporting on any and all things me-related! Today's top stories:

Teaching: is done! Both classes wrote final exams this week. Now to deal with the heaps of frantically-scrawled booklets, containing occasional gems of insight and lots of hazardous waste material ("Fritz ( Read more... )

My life is full of grading. 55 sets of fresh assignments per class, ranging from film journals to full-out research papers to final exams, coming in every week from now til mid-April, YAY. And the parts that aren't grading are lectures. DOUBLE YAY ( Read more... )

It was my goal this term to post things I've been teaching in my Animation class, as a way of getting back into writing about anime. But now I find it's the works I put on the syllabus that are just slightly out of my range that excite me most. I feel like I'm kind of phoning it in on anime, honestly, since I know the material I'm teaching so well ( Read more... )

I don't think anyone on my flist is in Montreal (besides eacherown), but if you are, or if you just want to know what's going on in the academic anime-sphere, check out this event being hosted by Concordia University next weekend:

Experiencing Media Mix: Anime, Manga, Video GamesThe keynote speaker is Otsuka Eiji on Saturday, and on Sunday there will be ( Read more... )

I'd like to write a long, impassioned post on the whole SOPA/PIPA issue that's exploded this week. So many people have already raised their voices to counter the corporate and legislative restriction of the open Internet, but if the rest of us say "Oh, I don't have to do anything now, other people are speaking out," eventually, no one except the ( Read more... )

In the year 2000, Saitou Tamaki published Sentou bishoujo no seishin bunseki, an early attempt at (psycho)analyzing Japan's budding otaku culture. I read sections of it in Japanese in 2010, but, frustrated by the psychoanalytic terminology, ended up working more off of others' critiques (notably Tom Lamarre's in The Anime Machine). From that ( Read more... )