Journal of Anime and Manga Studies (JAMS) - Volume 7

Volume to be published in December of 2026

The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies (JAMS) is excited to announce the call for papers for our seventh volume, to be published December 2026.

The Journal of Anime and Manga Studies is a peer reviewed, open-access journal published by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. JAMS is dedicated to publishing scholarly works exploring anime, manga, and a broad range of related topics, such as methodologies, cosplay, fandoms, adaptations, and more. As an open-access journal, JAMS aims to reach a broad-ranging audience of scholars (both within and beyond the academy) and interested general readers.

JAMS welcomes papers from a broad range of disciplines, studying anime, manga, and related topics from any relevant disciplinary approaches, frameworks, and scholarly perspectives. Work previously published in JAMS has drawn from media industry histories, data analysis, disability studies, and many more.

All papers published in JAMS are published with a Creative Commons license, Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This means that authors retain the rights to their work; JAMS does not have exclusive copyright.

Submissions to JAMS average should be between 6,500 and 8,000 words.

Please visit our site (https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/jams/about) for information about the journal and our policies.

JAMS also accepts expressions of interest for peer reviews. Scholars interested in supporting anime and manga studies as a discipline as peer reviewers should also reach out to JAMS.

See the linked papers below for examples of the works JAMS has published:

• The Dynamism of Anime Images: The Case of the ‘Kanada-style’ Movement -https://doi.org/10.21900/j.jams.v4.1195

• Embedded Niche Overlap: A Media Industry History of Yaoi Anime’s American Distribution from 1996 to 2009 -https://doi.org/10.21900/j.jams.v1.234

• The Spectacular Mundane in the Films of Studio Ghibli -https://doi.org/10.21900/j.jams.v2.507

• A Survey of the Story Elements of Isekai Manga -https://doi.org/10.21900/j.jams.v2.808

Submissions will be accepted until May 15th, 2026. While JAMS accepts submissions on a rolling basis, only papers submitted by that deadline will be guaranteed to be reviewed for potential inclusion in the 2026 volume.

NOTE: If interested in the JAMS@AX26 conference at Anime Expo, that is a separate CFP that can found here: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/02/09/jamsax26-anime-expo-academic-symposium 

Inquiries can be directed to Billy Tringali animestudiesjournal@gmail.com.