This paper and corresponding mapping project seeks to illuminate institutional and geographic trends of the academic field of Fat Studies. As an emerging interdisciplinary field, fat studies exists on the fringes of the academy, and there has been limited investigation of the scholarly landscape of the field, both conceptual and physical. Using the corpus of the eponymous journal Fat Studies as a dataset, this project focuses on the institutional and departmental affiliations of the authors publishing in the journal, and maps the institutional affiliations based on their geographic locations. Mimicking broader trends of academic publishing, the map visualizes the disparity of published research emerging from the West versus the rest of the world—a theme that has arisen as a critical issue amongst fat studies scholarship and related fat activism. The data also shows that much of the research being published in Fat Studies is emerging from public institutions, rather than private ones.
