CURRENT POSITION Instruction Librarian, Indiana University Indianapolis DEGREE MLIS, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 2019 FAST FACT He destroyed the car of the inventor of Craisins. FOLLOW billytringali.com; go.iu.edu/anime; billytringali.bsky.social Photo ©SPJA 2025

Anime Apostle

By age 12, Billy Tringali was hooked on manga. “Reading something that came from all the way around the world was magical,” he says. “The stories were so different.” His hometown library in Kingston, MA, where he volunteered, had none, so he donated his collection. “It was incredible to see so many kids reading books that I put on the shelf,” he recalls. 

Although those early experiences got him interested in libraries, it wasn’t until he arrived at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign that a “burning need to support the medium” took hold. It was the third largest academic library in the United States, but with anime articles sprinkled among niche subscription journals, research was still challenging. 

Tringali founded the Journal of Anime and Manga Studies (JAMS), the only open-access journal dedicated to anime and manga studies in English. Elevating the voices of 40 international scholars, it publishes only a fifth of the work it receives. JAMS has had more than 135,000 downloads. 

Tringali then partnered with Anime Expo, the largest such convention in North America, to host JAMS@AX, an academic conference within the fandom-focused one, producing more than 70 hours of programming. Kristi Palmer, his colleague at Indiana University Indianapolis, calls the way he elegantly and subtly lifts up higher education “profound.” 

Now Tringali is getting ready to speak on anime research in Japan and Germany, noting, “The work that I’ve been doing has never changed. What changes and grows is the community I build around it.”