My colleague and friend, Scott Timcke, recently posed a challenge on twitter to list five "key books" in communication studies. This can't be a "best of" list, though, as the field of communication is too broad and/or balkanized for any five books to be key--or even relevant--to all, most, or many of us. I...
academic
A Burning Hand of Fire
I just finished Charles Hatfield’s new book, Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby, which is the latest addition to the University Press of Mississippi’s “Great Comics Artists” series. I’m not a Kirby expert or acolyte, though I’ve always appreciated the manic, insane energy of Kirby’s work–most especially of his Fourth World...
New Research Available
Some findings from my research are now available. If you are reading this from a computer with institutional access, then you can check out my newly released article from The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, “The Android’s Dungeon: Comic-bookstores, Cultural Spaces, and the Social Practices of Audiences.” My thanks to the editors and...
What I Did on My Summer Vacation
I recently returned from my trip to the UK. Before going, I’d read an article in the Globe and Mail about how Canadians have the worst culture shock when we go to Britain because we somehow expect everything to be the same in the mother country. I mean, we have the same Queen, how...
A Fan by Any Other Name
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet. (Romeo and Juliet II.2, 45–46) One of the things that’s been really fun about my recent interviews has been talking with people about how they use words like nerd, geek, and fan. Despite my own (admittedly nerdish)...
Going on Tour
I’m planning a trip to the UK this summer. I’ve long been enamoured of the media, cultural, and communication studies research community in Britain: I’m on one of the major mailing lists, and there always seem to be interesting conferences, talks, and workshops going on in the British Isles. I was happy to discover...
Will the “Real” Nerds Please Stand Up?
In a recent post on CBC Radio 3’s blog, host Lana Gay asked whether her listeners consider themselves “music nerds.” Their responses provide some examples of people wrestling with what nerd means today, and how it relates to other terms like geek, aficionado, snob, or—dare I say?—hipster:* AlexofAnders writes, “I don’t really think I...
Progress Report
‘Tis the season to file reports of one’s progress, and so I’ve updated my research page to reflect the current state of my project. For those of you playing our home game, the first of two phases of fieldwork was completed last summer, and I’ve since been processing, analyzing, and writing up the data...