Current information about my research can be read here.
Outdated information that I’ll remove later once archived:
I considered devising the Otaku Zoku Project [1] post-Otakon 2008, when I began to finalize plans for my potential studies in graduate school. My aim is to study Japanese animation, fan (sub)cultures, media theory, and cultural production on the Internet. The Otaku Tribe Project is a research project funded by my own resources (and relates to my research with Professor Sarah Frederick (of the Boston University Modern Foreign Languages & Comparative Literature department) on 1920s Japanese print media).
The goals of the Fan Tribe Project on this blog are to 1) analyze Japanese animation by means of a new approach to literary theory, modernized for the multicultural and directorial/productive/consumptive layers of contemporary media, and 2) examine the fan culture of the otaku, fans of Japanese animation, contextually in both Japan and the United States.
As I stated before, I pen this blog to focus those thoughts relevant to graduate school. My original plan: apply to the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT. Because in December 2008 admissions were frozen, I am primarily looking at a PhD in Communications at USC Annenberg. Whether or not I get accepted to grad school, I am currently composing two manuscripts for potential book publications.
All of my blog entries relevant to the project will be linked to under the “Fan Tribe Project” link in the Categories section (which will act as a filter for those who only want to see the “anime blog”).
Although not germane, but still related, I have listed the blog entries related to Japan, the Japanese language, and other Japanese media in the Fan Tribe Project section, taking the “anime blog” up a notch to a more general “Japan blog.”
[1] Otaku zoku, or お宅族, roughly translates to “fan tribe.” The term otaku, as an term of identification among fans of Japanese animation, was first published by Akio Nakamori in 1983 (you can read the original at ブリッコ or an English translation at Neojaponisme).