I have just learnt that an old acquaintance (a writer, one I haven't met for over two decades) claims to be in a field called "Adaptation Studies."

I tried to look up "Adaptation Studies" and found that:

• Wikipedia does not have an article specifically on "Adaptation Studies" yet
  
• The first page hits from Google about "Adaptation Studies" are papers/publications talking about how much and how quickly the field is changing (rather than anything with a short passage that actually says what "Adaptation Studies" is).

I asked ChatGPT and got something like this:

quote:

Adaptation studies is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the study of the process of adapting works of literature, film, and other forms of media from one medium or culture to another. ...

So, from what little I have seen, "Adaptation Studies" must be something fairly new as a field, but likely with just enough being written about it before 2021 for it to make it into ChatGPT's model.

Now I am curious ... any of you folks know about "Adaptation Studies" as a field of study before seeing the term here? If you do, what do you think of it?

Mary Anna, Shirokuro ... do you see this field being recognized by your respective institutions?

I would've assumed it was something I'm biology ....

Yes, it's a real field. I own the field-defining book, Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Adaptation (2006). Its primary journal, Adaptation, is about the same age. I know people whose primary field of studies is adaptation theory.

I use it in my work on Agatha Christie, as she is famous for working and reworking her material over her fifty-year career, often adapting them from the page to the stage or from story to book. Adaptation studies is one critical framework I use to look at her reoccurring story elements to see what they can tell us about her writing practices and about how she responded to changes in society over her half-century-long career.

Interesting.