The Center for Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures; and Institute for Japanese Studies present:
"Your Job is What?! A Year in the Life of a Mangalogist"
Ryan Holmberg
Abstract: Manga historian, translator, and editor Ryan Holmberg provides an insider account of the mechanics and economics of working freelance within the English language manga localization industry. If you would like have lunch during the event, please register by September 12.
Download the PDF flyer here.
Ryan Holmberg is an independent art and comics historian, editor, and Japanese-English translator. He is the author of The Translator Without Talent (Bubbles, 2020) and Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964-1973 (Center for Book Arts, 2010). He has contributed numerous essays and reviews about art and comics to The Comics Journal, Artforum International, Art in America, and The New York Review. A Spanish selection of his writings will be published as Gekiga: Essays on Japanese Comics (Satori Ediciones, 2024). As an editor and translator of manga, Ryan has worked with Drawn & Quarterly, New York Review Comics, Breakdown Press, Retrofit Comics, PictureBox, Floating World, Bubbles, Glacier Bay Books, and Living the Line on over three dozen books. His edition of Tezuka Osamu’s The Mysterious Underground Men (PictureBox) won the 2014 Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material: Asia. Many of his books have been nominated for Eisners and other awards. He has served as an agent for such artists as Hayashi Seiichi, Tsuge Tadao, Baron Yoshimoto, and Yokoyama Yūichi. He has advised on manga-related exhibitions at the British Museum and the Honolulu Museum of Art. As a professional Japanese-English translator, Ryan has worked with numerous museums and arts organizations on exhibition catalogs, curatorial essays, and year-end reviews. He is also co-translator of No Nukes Asia, Japan’s The People of Asia Say No to Nuclear Power (Yoda Press, 2019). Ryan has taught courses about Japanese, Asian, and Modern/Contemporary art and culture at numerous schools, including Duke University, University of Chicago, and the University of Tokyo, in both English and Japanese. Since 2014, he has been affiliated with the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in Norwich, UK, as an Academic Associate. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
If you require an accommodation, such as live captioning, to participate in this event, please contact EASC at easc@osu.edu. Requests made at least two weeks in advance of the event will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but the university will make every effort to meet requests made after this date.
This event is supported by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.