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EastAsia+

3 d glasses with one side tinted turquoise and the other pink

EastAsia+  is a new initiative at Cornell University that combines programming, mentorship, and digital publishing around East Asian media studies and digital humanities. The Initiative is made up of a collective of interdisciplinary scholars, publishing professionals, librarians, curators, and graduate students. By bringing together voices and perspectives that traverse different disciplines, career stages, and research experiences, in and out of the university, EastAsia+ works to explore new possibilities for scholarship, academic publishing, networking, and collaboration in media studies and digital humanities research.

East Asia+ grew out of a desire to address the disconnect between digital publishing and the field of digital humanities. Scholars who work with and seek to publish research on digital media regularly encounter difficulties with presenting and gaining recognition for their work. We seek to engage with the pragmatic challenges that digital media researchers face when trying to represent and convey the material and affective features of different media. What are the needs of researchers and authors in East Asian media and digital studies, particularly those whose projects do not contain the kinds of computational analytic methods typically featured in digital humanities? What kinds of digital projects “count” in literature or history scholarship, or even in digital humanities? EastAsia+ aims to explore such questions through interactive workshops with its core collective and public-facing events that engage communities across Cornell and beyond. EastAsia+ is currently building a hybrid publication platform for East Asian media studies, as a series within the Cornell East Asia Series imprint at Cornell University Press. We are also hosting a guest speaker series. During our initial spring 2021 semester we invited two speakers: Josh Neves and Thomas Lamarre. The EastAsia+ Initiative is generously supported by a micro-grant from the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. For more information about our upcoming activities and to get involved with EastAsia+, please get in touch at eastasia-plus@cornell.edu.

Reframing Disability: Manga's Portrayals of Deaf Characters with Yoshiko Okuyama. Filmed on October 18, 2021.
EastAsia+ talk, April 29, 2021, by Joshua Neves.