From Weird To Wired: The Internet and "Fourth Generation" Anime Fandom

Finally up! The video is low quality because Youtube was unable to process the high-quality version for some reason. I may see if I can reupload it at a later date if the audio/video quality is problematic.

This is my paper as presented at the Manga Movies Project symposium, held at UEA in September 2012.

Between the discussion among anime fans at my Amecon panel, and that among my fellow academics who attended the symposium and spoke to me afterwards, I am aware that I have some expanding and exploration to do within this topic - expect that in a future blog post!

Now on Twitter

As part of the ongoing effort to keep myself from losing momentum in my study, I now have a Twitter account. The pressure of having more places to keep updated will hopefully prompt me to keep working on things!

I can be found on Twitter as @leahmholmes.

Manga UK Podcast #7

A bit of a shameless plug here (albeit an indirectly shameless one)! Last week the latest Manga UK Podcast went live and featured plenty of interesting discussion, most notably (from my perspective) about the ways in which Manga Entertainment and anime fandom - and anime itself - have changed over the years. Here's the shameless plug: I get a name check for the paper I presented at the Contemporary Japanese Media Cultures symposium at UEA a couple of weeks ago. Hooray!

Go check the podcast out, for it is quite excellent.

A video of my paper from UEA should hopefully be online soon.

The Changing Face of British Anime Fandom panel - Amecon 2012

Here's a video of my panel from Amecon 2012, held at Keele University from 10-12 August 2012. the title was "The Changing Face of British Anime Fandom" and included lots of discussion from the audience!

Many thanks to Tom and Zelly at Team Neko for filming the panel and putting it up online.

The Introductory Post

Welcome to my academia blog! My name is Leah Holmes, and I'm a PhD student at Bath Spa University in the UK.

My fields of interest include:

- Anime and manga studies
- Japanese studies
- Cultural studies
- Fan studies
- Orientalism

My thesis topic is Orientalism among British anime fans and Auto-Orientalism in Japanese cultural industries.

The goal of this blog is to help me sustain my momentum in my reading and writing, and hopefully to engage in discussion with other fans and academics. I will be posting essays and reviews on a (hopefully) regular basis, as well as links to videos of my papers and presentations. My current plan is to dedicate one of the two days off I get per week to study, and then I will update with something that comes from that day's study once a week. This will probably be on Sundays as that's a shorter working day, and also marks the end of my working week.