Ian Condry is an associate professor of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in media, popular culture, and globalization, with a focus on contemporary Japan and the United States. His first book, Hip-Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization (Duke University Press, 2006), is an ethnography of the Japanese rap music scene, exploring issues of race, gender, language, popular music history and cultural politics, primarily through the perspectives of Japanese musicians. He is currently writing The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story (to be published by Duke University Press).
Mia Consalvo is an associate professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University, and Canada Research Chair in Game Studies and Design. Author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage of Videogames (2007), she is currently writing a book about Japan’s influence on the videogame industry and game culture. Her work has been published in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Games & Culture, Game Studies, Convergence, and many other journals. Consalvo is president of the Association of Internet Researchers. She has held positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ohio University, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Chubu University in Japan. She has presented her work at various academic and professional conferences, including several times at the Game Developers Conference.
Thomas Lamarre teaches in East Asian Studies and Communications Studies at McGill University. His book Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirô on Cinema and Oriental Aesthetics (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, 2005) looks at silent cinema and global imagery. Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription (Duke University Press, 2000) deals with the communication networks of ninth-century Japan. The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) examines animation technologies. Lamarre has also edited volumes about the impact of modernity on East Asia, as well as about pre-emptive war. As associate editor of Mechademia, he has edited volumes on manga (Japanese comics), anime and fan cultures. He is a participant in the Canadian Foundation Innovation grant to construct a moving image research laboratory.
Margherita Long is an associate professor of Japanese and comparative literature at the University of California Riverside. Her fields of study include modern Japanese literature, feminist theory, psychoanalysis and Japanese visual culture. Her first book is called This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory and Freud (Stanford University Press, 2009). Her essay about Chernobyl and Fukushima titled “What Kind of Science? Reading Irigaray with Stengers” will be part of the book Philosophy after Irigaray to be published by SUNY Press. In March 2011, she began editing Mechademia's new online "Reviews and Commentary" section.
Thomas Looser is an associate professor of East Asian Studies at New York University. His areas of research include cultural anthropology, Japanese studies, critical theory, new media studies, animation, mass culture, architecture and urban form. Author of Visioning Eternity: Aesthetics, Politics, and History in the Early Modern Noh Theatre (Cornell University East Asia Book Series, 2008), he also has published numerous articles in Mechademia, Shingenjitsu, Japan Forum, The Journal of Pacific Asia, and other periodicals.
Eiji Otsuka is a professor in the Graduate School of Art and Design at Kobe Design University in Kobe, Japan. He is a leading Japanese theorist of manga (the Japanese word for comics), anime, fan cultures and media mix practice. His research interests span ethnography, manga studies, narratology, literature and Japanese animation cultures. Otsuka is also the creator of popular manga, such as MPD Psycho, Leviathan, and The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, and the author of a number of novels. His many books include A Theory of Narrative Consumption (1989), The Expressive Space of Postwar Japanese Manga (1994), The Atomu Thesis: Tezuka Osamu and the Main Theme of Postwar Manga (2003), The Mental History of the ‘Otaku’” (2004), A Theory of Subculture Literature (2004), and Why Japanimation Will Go Down (2005).
Matthew Penney is an assistant professor of History at Concordia University. His research focuses on critical historiography and popular representations of the Asia-Pacific War in Japanese popular culture. His research has been published in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Japanese Studies, Pacific Affairs, Social Science Japan Journal, and other publications. He is also the coordinator of the e-journal, Japan Focus.
Bart Simon is the current director of the Concordia Centre for Technoculture, Art and Games and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. His areas of expertise include game studies, science and technology studies and cultural sociology. His game studies research crosses a variety of genres, platforms and modalities looking at the relation of game cultures, socio-materiality and everyday life. Some of his work is represented in journals such as Games and Culture, Game Studies and Loading. His current research on gestural gaming is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada and he is a network investigator for the Canadian network on New Media, Animation and Games (GRAND NCE).
Marc Steinberg is an assistant professor of Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University. His research interests span Japanese animation, visual culture, media convergence, and the impact of media theory on the conception and practice of Japan’s creative industries. His forthcoming book, Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), looks at media convergence during the development of Japanese television animation in the 1960s and the material culture that accompanied it. His essays have been published in Mechademia, Japan Forum, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Journal of Visual Culture, and Theory, Culture & Society.
Toshiya Ueno is a professor in the Department of Expressive Cultures and Transcultural Studies at Wako University in Tokyo, Japan. His writing covers media studies, cultural studies, animation studies and intellectual history. He is the author of numerous books, including Artificial Nature: Toward a Cyborg Politics (Keisoushobo, 1996), Crimson Metal Suit: Anime as Battlefield (Kinokuniya Shoten, 1998), which is forthcoming in English as Crimson Metal Suit: War in Animation (University of Michigan Press), as well as Urban Tribal Studies: Sociology of Club and Party Culture (Getsuyousha, 2005). He is also a co-author of Introduction to Cultural Studies (Chikuma Shobo, 2000). His latest work, Unlearning Archipelagoes: Postwar Avant-garde Thought in Japan (forthcoming from Iwanami Shoten), examines the impact of postwar Japanese intellectual thought coming into contact with post-structuralist thinking.
