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More Anime College and University Courses Being Offered
Ninja Master Gara writes "Anime News Network reports New York University is offering a new courses on the anime industry and culture. Anime is slowly expanding from University Clubs into mainstream college courses, many of which begin at the 'What is anime?' level. Several Universities and Community Colleges already offer similar courses, or incorporate anime into existing studies." If any school decides to offer a course on the Gundam series, I'd be happy to teach a class.
This reminds me of the Star Trek courses that several colleges have had over the years. What a laugh riot. One syllabus I saw was basically watching 3 select star trek episodes a week, discussing them in class, and writing 5 papers analyzing them over the course of the semester. But still, that would be a great way to fulfill a GenEd humanities requirement or whatnot.
Repeal the DMCA!
I go to Western Washington University in Washington state and the Art History 270 course (India, Japan, China) taught by Momi Naughton takes an entire lecture period to talk about anime with a self-professed anime maniac, whose name I forget. He goes way back to influences such as Hokusai and brings basically the entire span of what we learned in the class and how if affected the development of anime. Quite interesting...
sig.
At the University of Texas at *Austin* last fall was a full course focusing on just anime taught by Dr. Susan Napier of the Asian Studies Center there. (Dr. Napier did a guest lecture at Dr. Gossin's course last spring when we taught "Nausicaa" for the second time.) Dr. Napier has been invited as a guest lecturer at Harvard this spring and will be reteaching the anime course there. Yes, they're actually officially studying anime at *Harvard*! (Prepare for hell to free over after classes start there in a few weeks..... )
As for the complaint about the lack of college level books about anime (in English, that is) that's true. But Dr. Napier has completed her book "Anime from 'Akira' to 'Princess Mononoke'" and it will be out sometime this spring or summer. This will be the first college level analysis/literary criticism of anime available in English.
When I was in college (www.vt.edu) a few years back, I attended some of the local anime clubs from time to time.
I say some because there were three total university recgonized, bona-fide, clubs at that school. They each had separate meetings, which mostly comprised of 6-hour long screenings of non-stop anime. That's 18-hours a week, of nothing but the best in Japanese sci-fi, drama, comedy, fantasy and the occasional kids show.
Now was was really interesting about all this interest in Anime, was not the shows themselves, but rather the interest in Japanese culture they fostered. The clubs featured regular weekend clinics for language and culture courses and interest groups. A few club members even took trips to Japan regularily.
The fact that universities are starting to recognize this kind of love for culture (not just entertainment) seems like a perfect way to diversify the curriculum. It's about time!