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December 2, 2025

Jeffrey A. Tolbert is associate professor of American Studies and Folklore at Penn State Harrisburg. His work centers on supernatural belief and the uses of tradition in popular media. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters, and is co-editor, with Michael Dylan Foster, of the books The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World and Möbius Media: Popular Culture, Folklore, and the Folkloresque. His current book project explores the uses of folklore in the horror genre....

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November 22, 2025

Giuseppe Samo is currently an adjunct professor at Beijing Language and Culture University, a research associate at the IDIAP Research Institute in Martigny, Switzerland, and an external researcher at the University of Geneva. His research focuses on the interactions between formal approaches to language and computational representations in machines. He has also published work in digital humanities, with a focus on generic terms in literature and on geographical data. He is a member of the University of Zurich’s DSI Gaming Community and is proudly a videogamer....

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November 18, 2025

Thessa Jensen, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. My research examines how fan communities emerge and evolve on digital platforms, with particular attention to the ethical, relational, and design dimensions of participatory culture. Through my own long-term engagement in fanfiction communities as a reader and writer I explore how fans negotiate recognition, creativity, and power in online spaces. Theoretically, my work is grounded in the Danish philosopher and theologian Knud Ejler Løgstrup’s ontological ethics and German philosopher Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition, which I use to analyse how digital media mediate responsibility, vulnerability, and acknowledgment between users, designers, and institutions. Across projects in interactive digital media, design fiction, and transmedia storytelling, I...

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November 18, 2025

Michael Dylan Foster is a professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches courses about Japanese folklore, heritage, tourism, food, and popular culture. He is the author of many works on Japanese folklore and media, including Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yōkai (University of California Press, 2009) and The Book of Yōkai, Expanded Second Edition (University of California Press, 2024). Among his coedited volumes are The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World (Utah State University Press, 2015), Matsuri and Religion: Complexity, Continuity, and Creativity in Japanese Festivals (Brill, 2021), and Möbius Media: Popular Culture, Folklore and the Folkloresque (Utah State University Press, 2024)....

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November 18, 2025

Takako Kawabata is an Associate Professor at the International Professional University of Technology in Nagoya, Japan, and a Research Associate at the Japan Research Centre, SOAS University of London. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from SOAS, where she specialized in how language, culture, and society shape one another. Her research explores globalization, media, cultural exchange, and the social meanings of language, with particular focus on Japanese and English contexts. She has published and taught in areas such as World Englishes, language policy, English language teaching, and Japanese language education. Recently, she has also been developing research on language and food, examining how culinary culture communicates identity, authenticity, and social belonging. Alongside her academic work, she collaborates in the globalization of Japanese...

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November 18, 2025

Robert Fitts has published eleven books and numerous articles on the history of baseball in Japan and Japanese baseball cards. He received his PhD in historical archaeology from Brown University and ran excavations in New York City before turning to baseball history. He is the founder and chair of the Society of American Baseball Research’s Asian Baseball Committee and recently received the society’s Chadwick Award for lifetime contributions to baseball history. He currently is a curatorial consultant for the Yakyu-Baseball exhibit at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown....

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November 18, 2025

“Rocket” is the owner of Rocket Props, and inventor of the EVA foam cutting tool called the BevAll™. An electro-mechanical engineer by day, maker, propmaker, swordfighter, and cosplayer by night, he has been making and building props for more than ten years.   Combined with his engineering background and experience, Jacob loves to educate, share, and inspire more people to make things, whether through cosplay or other means.  Jacob holds one world record (Elephant's Toothpaste with Mark Rober), and two patents.  Most recently, he is focused on developing and selling his tool called the BevAll™, designed to make cutting bevels in EVA foam more accessible and less physically demanding.  ...

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November 18, 2025

Nansong Zhou is a Ph.D. student in Communication and Media at the Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. His research examines the global game industry, player–game relationships, and the cultural and social influence of games. He is  the Student and Early Career Representative of the International Communication Association (ICA) Game Studies Division. Nansong has received Top Paper and Top Student Paper awards from the National Communication Association (NCA) and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). His work on parasocial interaction, digital labor, and the stigmatization of video games has been published in Game Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Media International Australia. He has presented at more than ten international conferences, including ICA, NCA,...

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November 18, 2025

George J. Horvath has always found more of an appreciation & interest in the stuff that everyone else ignores & forgets. So when he finally entered anime fandom in 2004, he eventually wound up being more interested in acting like Indiana Jones in a Hawaiian shirt & discovering the series, OVAs, & movies that have been forgotten to time. In 2010 he started up The Land of Obscusion, the self-proclaimed “Home of the Obscure & Forgotten”, where he reviews the anime & manga next to no one else would bother to write about nowadays (some of which have never been written about in detail in English before!), brings up what old titles deserve being licensed rescued (& a bunch of them have...

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November 18, 2025

Samantha Close is an Associate Professor of Media and Popular Culture in the College of Communication at DePaul University. She researches fandom, popular culture (particularly Japanese media and video games), and creative work. You can see her documentary on crafting here: https://www.vice.com/en/article/etsy-crafting-in-the-computer-age-the-unseen-workers-who-make-etsy-possible/ and read her writing in open-access venues like Transformative Works and Cultures, Social Media + Society, the International Journal of Communication, and Newsweek. ...

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