Contemporary East Asian Media Centre

The Contemporary East Asian Media Centre (CEAMC) is an attempt to build a new international research coalition in the rapidly emerging fields of New Media, Convergence Culture, Anime, Manga, Video Games and other related media (such as fan-culture). A large proportion of this type of media emerges from the East Asian region, and there is presently no major research centre devoted to studying it, its importance as a series of transformative, cutting edge, transnational global commodities, or as a series of cultural products that reveal much about East Asia itself. There is a scattered (and growing) group of international researchers working in this field, and they are in need of organisation and direction. CEAMC is the ideal way to provide international focus in this cutting edge field in the humanities, and to locate The Netherlands (and Leiden) at the heart of this movement. CEAMC will seek to orchestrate direction in the field in five major ways: 1) it will organise a series of international state of the field conferences in Leiden; 2) it will disseminate the results of these conferences using new and old media (ie. website and book publications); 3) it will construct a central online database for the use of international researchers in the field; 4) it will prepare a proposal for the launch of a new journal to showcase the emerging field; 5) the principal applicant (Goto-Jones) will prepare a major grant proposal under the European ERC Grant Schemes.