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Open Call for Applications for Full-time Position: Comparative Culture Institution: Saitama University Institution URL: http://www.saitama-u.ac.jp/ Department: Faculty of Liberal Arts Institution type: National University Content of Work: The successful applicant will teach four 90-minute undergraduate classes per week and one 90-minute graduate seminar per week, and perform the administrative duties required of full-time faculty. Classes will deal with comparative culture (Japanese and a second culture). The primary language of instruction will be English. Research field: Human Science and Comparative Culture               Japanese Culture with a focus on Visual Studies, Film Studies, or Media Studies. Job type: Assistant Professor (Lecturer) or Associate Professor Rank: Full-time tenured position with mandatory retirement at age 65; Assistant Professor: Full-time tenure-track position with 5-year term limit (one renewal possible; tenure comes with promotion to associate professor). Work area: Kanto district ? Saitama Address:  Saitama University, Faculty of Liberal Arts 255 Shimo-okubo, Sakura-ku, Saitama-shi, Saitama-ken, 338-8570 Japan Number of positions: 1 Qualifications:  1. Native or near-native level of fluency in English.  2. Ph.D. in the relevant field (advanced Ph.D. Candidates also may apply).  3. Japanese language reading and speaking skills.  4. Experience teaching in English to Japanese college-level students is preferable. Salary & Benefits: This position carries the standard benefits package, including salary, research funds, and pension available to regular faculty at a national university. Deadline for applications: 2009 / 7 /10 - 2009 / 9 /25 Starting date: 2010/04/01 Application materials: mail the following to the Faculty of Liberal Arts: 1. Detailed CV including research publications, research presentations, and teaching experience. 2. Two letters of recommendation. 3. Copy of Ph.D. diploma (if applicable). 4. Three representative publications (in either English or Japanese) 5. Outline of future research plans (around 1000 words). 6. Statement of your views on education (around 1000 words). Contact: Selection Committee for the HSCC Professor (sc-hscc@gr.saitama-u.ac.jp) Additional information: Personal Information accompanying submitted application materials will be used only for selection and employment purposes. Materials submitted with application will not be returned. Saitama University is an equal opportunity employer.

  Call for Contributions         The Blackwell Companion to the Historical Film   Editors: Robert A Rosenstone, California Institute of Technology      Constantin Parvulescu, Washington University in St Louis The editors invite contributions to The Blackwell Companion to Historical Film, a volume of 25 to 30 essays devoted to the latest scholarship on the origins, contributions, history, range, codes, strategies, poetics, politics, tropes, production, packaging, and cultural impact of this important genre, the dramatic historical feature film. The Companion will be a major work which will survey the field as it exists today and also be suitable as a textbook for history-on-film and film-studies classes. The collection focuses only on feature films, and will include essays by both leading and emerging scholars in the fields of history, cinema studies, cultural studies, and other fields that have something to offer this inherently interdisciplinary topic.  Scholars such as Robert Burgoyne, Marcia Landy, and Catherine Portugues, Paula Rabinowitz, Alison Landsberg, Denise Youngblood, and Guy Westwell have already committed themselves to essays for the volume. We are currently seeking essays on particular topics, but scholars interested in contributing to the collection need not limit themselves to these themes but should feel free to suggest anything related to the genre of the historical film: •       American history (especially 18 and 19th centuries) on film •       African-American and American-Indian history on film •       Exile and diaspora historical films •       Cinematic adaptations of historical novels •       Minor histories and minor heroes on film •       The historical film and the national mythology (outside Europe) •       History on film and history on other media, including animation •       Production and marketing of historical films Those who wish to contribute should send a working title, a brief description of the proposed essay and a short bio to both editors: rr@hss.caltech.edu and ctparvulescu@gmail.com. Essays are to be between 8,000 and 10,000 words long; they will be due on March 1, 2011. Abstracts submission deadline: May 1, 2010. 

Workshop on Popular Culture, Cultural Policy, and Cultural Discourse in East and Southeast Asia, June 1-2, 2009, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem The workshop on Popular Culture, Cultural Policy, and Cultural Discourse in East and Southeast Asia, will be held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. The purpose of this workshop is to conduct a comparative and multi-sited study of the emergence of the popular cultural industries of East and Southeast Asia, examine the corresponding cultural policies initiated by the various states in the region, and construct an empirically-plausible framework to examine related issues. The workshop will particularly focus on the cases of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean poplar cultures: their emergence, expansion to other markets in the region, and the discourse they create. Panel 1: Popular Culture, Regionalization, and the State 1. Amitav Acharya, American University, "Culture, Regionalism and Southeast Asian Identity" 2. Galia Press-Barnathan, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem "Does Popular Culture Matter to International Relations Scholars? Possible Links and Methodological Challenges" 3. Nissim Otmazgin, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem "A Tail that Wags the Dog: Cultural Industry and Cultural Policy in East Asia" Commentator: Arie Kacowicz, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Panel 2: Cultural Flows and Soft Power 1. Chua Beng Huat, National University of Singapore "Delusional Desire: Soft Power and TV Dramas" 2. Jean Marie Bouissou, Science-Po "From Niche Market to Hypermarkets: The Birth, Growth and Maturation of the French Manga Market" 3. Eldad J. Pardo, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem "The Comeback of Iran's Z $B{ (Brkh $Bb (Bneh: Ancient Heroes in the Global Age" Commentator: Eyal Ben Ari, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Panel 3: Cultural Policy in the Making 1. Kozuka Souichirou, Sophia University "Copyright Law as a Tool of New Industrial Policy?: Japan's Unsuccessful Attempt to Promote its Contents Industry" 2. Kukhee Choo, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies "Cool Japan Nation: Japanese Governmental Policy towards the Anime Industry" 3. Jung-Yup Lee, University of Massachusetts, Amherst "Managing the Transnational, Governing the National: Cultural Policy and the Politics of "Cultural Archetype Project in South Korea" Commentator: Ehud Harari, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Panel 4: Cultural Industry and Cultural Discourse 1. Miki Daliot-Bul, Haifa University "The New 'Japan Brand': Cool Japan as Zeitgeist" 2. Pang Laikwan, the Chinese University of Hong Kong "Censorship against Ghosts: China's Cultural Policy Historicized" 3. Kwai Cheung Lo, Hong Kong Baptist University "Historical Tensions in East Asian Popular Culture and the Roles of the State" Commentator: Chua Beng Huat, National University of Singapore Panel 5: Cultural Production and Social Change 1. Marwyn S. Samuels, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem "The Media Industry, Popular Culture and Social Change in Contemporary China" 2. Shin Hyunjoon, Sungkonghoe University "Trans/National Cultural Industries as an Agency of Regionalization? The Case of South Korea" 3. Cherian George, Nanyang Technological University "Silence and Protest in Singapore's Censorship Debates" Commentator: Nir Avieli, Ben-Gurion University Panel 6: A Comparative Perspective: Popular Culture in the Middle East 1. Wael Abu-Uksa, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem "State and New Media in the Middle East: An Overview" 2. Sariel Birnbaum, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem "Historical Audio-Visual Dramas: From Egyptian Dominance to a Pan-Arab Satellite Discourse" 3. Tal Shenhav, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem "Broadcasting the Future Generation: Gender Messages for Women and Youth in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Tunisia" Panel 7: Concluding Comments and Open Discussion Peter J. Katzenstein, Cornell University Eyal Ben Ari, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem For further information and registration please contact Dr. Nissim Otmazgin at nissimot@mscc.huji.ac.il

                                  H-JAPAN                                April 5, 2009 From: David Slater <d-slater@sophia.ac.jp> Graduate Fieldwork Workshop April 18th, 2009 Sophia University (Yotsuya Campus) http://www.fla.sophia.ac.jp/about/location.html Bldg. #10, room 301 10 am-noon ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Title: Economic competitive advantage and cultural exports: how Japan got round cultural distance to claim global leadership in comic book publishing. Julien Vig (Sociology MSc candidate at Hitotsubashi University and research student at the Institute of Innovation Research) ABSTRACT: Since the 1990s, the joint influences of nation branding efforts and the increasing globalization of the economic and technological contexts within which media organizations operate have brought upon an era where America's dominant position as an exporter of contents is becoming increasingly challenged by new entrants, often industrial consortia backed by state agencies. Serious contenders may include India's Bollywood movies, Brazil's telenovelas, or South Korea's array of dynamic entertainment industries. Yet beyond the cultural significance of the phenomenon, their actual export performance only qualifies them as cultural niches when compared to the incumbent transnational American corporations, whose distribution monopolies and market power make their economic control of global flows a reality that remains hardly escapable. Japan, however, distinguished itself by securing global leadership in no less than three content industries. In videogames, animation and comic books, it stands out a leading exporting country, boasting impressive trade surpluses with America and Europe. There is a solid, established interdisciplinary body of international literature dedicated to Japan's videogame industry, and the anime industry has been similarly attracting increasing attention in the past ten years. The comic book industry on the other hand, arguably because of its limited legitimacy and economic significance outside the $4bn+ Japanese domestic market, remains largely understudied except for comic book and popular culture scholars. An overlooked specificity of the comic book industry stems from the most peculiar pattern of globalization it has experienced. From the 1950s onwards, the United States, France and Japan each developed their own publishing paradigm and standard formats: *comic book*, *album* and *manga*. These path-dependent creative and industrial trajectories would hardly interact until the second half of the 1990s. After their late encounter, Japanese manga emerged as the undisputed winner, reaching shares of about 1/3 of total comic book sales in value in both France and America in 2007. This achievement has interesting theoretical implications. On the one hand, media scholars showed that the primary vehicles for the development of * contra-flows* (defined as non-Western media flows which counter the previously established one-way information flow from western to non-west countries) are geographic, cultural or linguistic regionalism; yet this framework cannot account for how Japanese manga could succeed in Western markets, as none of the above patterns seems to apply. On the other hand, management scholars, in the dominant models of firm- and industry-level internationalization, accept as a prerequisite that agents are actively and strategically trying to internationalize; yet Japanese manga publishers long maintained a passive attitude towards market expansion outside of Asia. Drawing upon fieldwork in France and Japan, international comparisons of industry data and evidence from a consumer survey conducted in France in December 2008, my research aims to uncover the economics at work behind the success of Japanese manga on the global comic book scene. What are the conditions for the emergence of sustainable contra-flows? The study of Japan's prominent success in exporting domestic contents may hold the answer to this question and provide a blueprint for later entrants in the global cultural market. -- David H. Slater, Ph.D. Faculty of Liberal Arts Sophia University, Tokyo The Sophia server rejects emails at times. Should your mail to me get returned, please resend to: dhslater@gmail.com. Sorry for the inconvenience.