Casey Brienza is a sociologist-in-training who splits her time between the halls of the academy and the periphery of the creative industries. She received her A.B. from Mount Holyoke College in 2003 and her M.A. from New York University's Department of Media, Culture, and Communication in 2009, where she completed a thesis which provides a socio-historical account of the growing popularity of manga in the United States. In 2004, she studied manhwa while on a teaching Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea. With the generous support of a Trinity College External Research Studentship, she is now continuing her research into manga publishing and the transnational production of print culture as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Her academic work may be found in Publishing Research Quarterly, The International Journal of the Book, and Contexts. She has received student paper awards from the Japan-U.S. Communication Association and The New Jersey Project on Inclusive Scholarship, Curriculum and Teaching and has been elected to the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum. Also considered one of the top manga experts in the United States, Casey has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, and critic. Since 2005, she has published over a thousand professional writings (features, columns, reviews, news articles, etc.) with Anime Insider, Otaku USA, Protoculture Addicts, AnimeNewsNetwork.com, GraphicNovelReporter.com, and elsewhere.
