Meet The Indiana University Indianapolis Librarian Billy Tringali

BILLY TRINGALI’S OFFICE at IU Indianapolis feels more like a Comic-Con booth than an academic’s hidey hole. Posters of saucer-eyed anime and manga heroes cover every vertical surface, and memorabilia line every horizontal one. “It’s like an open-air museum,” Tringali says. “There’s not an inch of wall that’s not covered.”

Tringali is IU’s instruction librarian for undergraduate health sciences, which sounds pretty buttoned up. Until he starts talking about what it entails. “I teach students to hunt things down,” he says. “I do basic AI literacy training. Essentially explaining that you don’t just trust what a chatbot says, because it’s probably lying to you.”

But that’s only part of the story. In addition to his day job, Tringali is also founder and editor of the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, which makes him arguably one of the world’s leading voices in the scholarly study of the subject.Anime has exploded in the U.S., fueled in part by its omnipresence on streaming services such as Netflix. And manga with titles like My Hero Academia and One Piece are wildly popular among younger readers. Well, not just younger readers. Plenty of grown-ups read them too.

Tringali says people are attracted to anime and manga for simple reasons: accessibility and variety. There’s decades’ worth of materials to read and watch, with subject matter ranging from horror, to adventure, to esoteric philosophic ramblings—sometimes all three in the same work. “Whatever interests you, it exists in anime, and there is a massive backlog for you to explore,” Tringali says. “Anime and manga can be powerful teaching tools for enhancing cultural understanding and improving language skills.”

In addition to reading and watching pretty much everything in the anime/manga world, he’s also analyzed this corner of the pop culture universe in great detail. His journal is the only open access academic periodical that exclusively publishes works discussing the worlds of anime, manga, cosplay, and their fans. What began as a graduate school project now attracts scholars and aficionados from around the world. Every year, Tringali helps run a standing-room-only academic conference at Anime Expo in Los Angeles. “We pack the house,” he says. “Fans are really, really hungry for academic analysis of popular culture.”

His influence is such that within the community he’s known as the anime apostle. He got hooked on the genre early, spending his childhood sitting on his grandmother’s “horrendously purple” living room rug watching endless episodes of Pokémon. When he realized his local library didn’t offer manga, he established a substantial collection simply by donating books from his own trove. “I watched them all being cataloged and thought, Oh, this is going to be a huge problem for me,” Tringali recalls.

Today, his enthusiasm burns just as hot as it did during his Jigglypuff-besotted youth. He channels his devotion by helping students see not only the academic value in his favorite pop culture genre but also the importance of other subcultures. For instance, he’s developing a student sewing circle for cosplay fans who dress up as characters to learn how to sew their own costumes. For the anime apostle, it’s all about spreading the word.