In my last post, I shouted out Abigail De Kosnik’s dissertation, Illegitimate Media: Race, Gender, and Censorship in Digital Remix Culture. De Kosnik’s goal for this project was “to place African Americans and women at the beginning of the history of popular digital culture, to ensure that they are credited with the invention and popularization of ( Read more... )

“The flexible transmedia seriality of fan works becomes obvious in those which have “escaped” fan culture to become mainstream successes. Mainstream audiences often attempt to retroactively build a baseline to make sense of fan works’ narrative and aesthetic experimentation; yet, without access to the history of other fan works, they start from a ( Read more... )

Putting on an exhibition was the furthest thing from my mind when, through my PhD assistantship, I was placed at Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art in the Fall of 2022. To say that I was anxious to talk authoritatively about fine art would be a dramatic understatement. Historically, my visits to art museums included confusion about what ( Read more... )

Dramatic literature and theatre is my first field: though I was a fan before I was anything else, I wasn’t a fan studies scholar till later in my career.  But, like many academics, my interest in the subjects I’ve studied borders on fannish interest, and so theatre is one of my fandoms.

Kirsty Sedgwick is a major figure in audience studies, and she ( Read more... )