User:Timothy Perper

By training, I'm a biologist (PhD, City University of New York, 1969) but I have published in scholarly (peer reviewed) periodicals and books in human sexuality, in manga/anime (Japanese cartooning), and in library studies for nearly 40 years, much of it in collaboration with my wife Martha Cornog. I have also published books in each of these areas. I have also edited (and am listed on the masthead of) two scholarly (print) encyclopedias and have been book review editor for several scholarly journals as well. I am now retired, though still hard at work writing and publishing.

Details... I have been publishing extensively about animal and human sexuality in the professional, scholarly, peer-reviewed print literature since the 1970s. Alone and together, Martha and I have published several professional books on human sexuality, and I have been on editorial masthead of several scholarly sexuality journals and encyclopedias, including the multivolume International Encyclopedia of Sexuality, edited by Robert T. Francoeur, PhD and Ray Noonan, PhD. 2001-ongoing. NY: Continuum. (Available online from the Kinsey Institue: http://kinseyinstitute.org/ccies/jp.php). I am also a member, for some decades, of several professional sexuality research and therapy organizations. We're also co-editors of Robert T. Francoeur, editor-in-chief, Martha Cornog, Timothy Perper, and Norman A. Scherzer. 1995. "The Complete Dictionary of Sexology, New Expanded Edition." NY: Continuum. (We're also co-editors of the old, unexpanded edition.) You can find out more about my books on amazon.com.

More details... : For about a decade, we've also been publishing about manga and anime in the scholarly, peer-reviewed print literature. For example:

Perper, Timothy and Martha Cornog 2002 "Eroticism for the masses: Japanese manga comics and their assimilation into the U.S." Sexuality & Culture, Volume 6, Number 1, pages 3-126 (Special Issue).

Abstract in Japanese: http://www.geocities.jp/anmecomics4u/articles/2002/article_02-2.html

Link may be password protected: http://springerlink.com/content/30p8x1878nbjlrax/?p=b1029f7f328e4c91aa42cf8f4d3a825a&pi=0

Perper, Timothy and Martha Cornog 2003 "Sex, love, and women in Japanese comics." In Robert T. Francoeur and Raymond Noonan, editors, The Comprehensive International Encyclopedia of Sexuality. New York: Continuum. pages 663-671. Available online as section 8D in http://kinseyinstitute.org/ccies/jp.php.

Martha and I are also Book Review Editors for Mechademia: An Academic Forum for Anime, Manga, and the Fan Arts (see http://mechademia.org/) and she is one of the two senior graphic novel reviewers for Library Journal. She and I have also adapted manga translated into English for the US commercial publisher TokyoPop (http://www.tokyopop.com/MangaSutra/tp_article/1188693.html -- you'll have to get the actual books to find our names). We're currently putting the final touches on an edited book for librarians about graphic novels.

Opinions... I've edited on Wikipedia for a while. It was a good idea, but by now Wikipedia is out-moded and outdated -- in a word, obsolete. The idea was OK, but Wikipedia's great failure was how, in a metaphor, they weren't able to prevent an uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable mass of "editors" from turning the place into a nightmare vision of the worst of high school -- vicious editing wars, feeble (or no) teachers, gangs of thugs wandering around deleting anything they don't like, in brief, ideologues, nationalists, egotists, and all too many just plain incompetent loudmouths named things like Kwodbog6. They were unable to establish a creative work environment, so it was a good idea that didn't work in practice. The Buddha, it is said, abhors perfection. Well, OK, but not that imperfect. So I heard about Citizendium and thought I'd give it a try. I have comments on the sex and manga pages, similar to my bio above. So let's see what happens.

Comments? By all means, but please put them on the discussion page, not here.