Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: Popular culture, manga, anime, fandom, new media, Japanese empire, gender, otaku, fujoshi, Japan, East Asia, empire, modern Japanese history

About Me: Andrea Horbinski holds a PhD in modern Japanese history with a designated emphasis in new media from the University of California, Berkeley. Her book manuscript, “Manga’s Global Century,” is a history of Japanese comics from 1905-1989. She has discussed anime, manga, fandom, and Japanese history at conventions and conferences on five continents, and her articles have appeared in Transformative Works and Cultures, Convergence, Internet Histories, and Mechademia. Before entering graduate school, she was a Fulbright Fellow to Japan at Doshisha University in Kyoto.

Her extensive experience in non-profit oversight includes a stint on the Board of Directors of the Organization for Transformative Works, a non-profit advocating for transformative works and the fans who create them; she was elected in 2012 and served as Secretary of the Board from 2014-15. Simultaneously, she served as an advisor to the Ada Initiative, a non-profit supporting the participation of women in technology and open culture, and was elected to the Board of Directors as Secretary in 2015. She has also served as a historical consultant to the UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project and the Education Department of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Before leaving Cal, she was a PhD candidate member of the NEH-funded committee on “The Future of the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences PhD at Berkeley” from 2016-17.

Recent Publications: “Convergence Culture,” forthcoming in Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2^nd ed, ed. George Ritzer & Chris Rojek (Oxford: Blackwell).

“Talking by Letter: The Hidden History of Female Media Fans on the 1990s Internet.” Forthcoming, Internet Histories. DOI: 10.1080/24701475.2018.1500794

“What You Watch Is What You Are? Early Anime and Manga Fandom in the United States.” Forthcoming, Mechademia Second Arc 12.1: Transnational Fandom (2019).

“Record of Dying Days: The Alternate History of Ôoku.” Mechademia 10 (2015). DOI: 10.5749/mech.10.2015.0063

“Watching, Creating, Archiving: Observations on the Quantity and Temporality of Fannish Productivity in Online Fan Fiction Archives.” Abigail De Kosnik, Laurent El Ghaoui, Andrew Godbehere, Andrea Horbinski, Vera Cuntz-Leng, Adam Hutz, Renée Pastel, Vu Pham. Convergence 21 (2015). DOI: 10.1177/1354856514560313

“Even a Monkey Can Understand Fan Activism: Political Speech, Artistic Expression, and a Public for the Japanese Dôjin Community.” Alex Leavitt and Andrea Horbinski. Transformative Works and Cultures 10 (June 2012). DOI: 10.3983/twc.2012.0321 Reprint in Japanese Popular Cultures, ed. Matthew Allen and Rumi Sakamoto (London: Routledge, 2014).