“Twenty‐five years ago, the publication of Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins (1992), effectively launched an exciting new field of fan studies. The publication of this large, multidisciplinary volume demonstrates beyond a doubt that both fandom and fan studies have come of age in the digital era. Established and new scholars alike reflect critically on a range of media texts, fan identities and fan practices in a number of contexts – material, geographical and online. Taken together, the issues and concerns raised will be of interest not only to fans and fan scholars but to anyone with an affiliation and affinity to popular culture in a highly‐mediated world.

Rhiannon Bury, Associate Professor, Athabasca University. Author of Television. 2.0: Viewer and Fan Engagement with Digital TV (2017, Peter Lang)

“Paul Booth brings together an impressive range of scholars, disciplines, and approaches in his Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies. Engaging with the most current research and broadening the field to include previously neglected topics, this collection raises the bar for fan studies scholarship.”

Kristina Busse, University of South Alabama

“As fandom becomes increasingly embedded in the structures and processes of our global, networked media environment, there is an urgent need to take stock of what we already (think we) know about emotionally involved media consumption. Paul Booth’s Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies does precisely that, providing a thought‐provoking and highly readable anthology that maps out the complexities and contradictions of Fan Studies’ past, present, and possible futures. Pushing the field into previously uncharted waters while also impressively reassessing and adding to seminal debates, these essays will undoubtedly help to shape the landscape of fan research for years to come.”

Richard McCulloch, Fan Studies Network Board Member and Lecturer in Film and Cultural Studies, Centre for Participatory Culture, University of Huddersfield, UK

This series provides theoretically ambitious but accessible volumes devoted to the major fields and subfields within cultural studies, whether as single disciplines (film studies) inspired and reconfigured by interventionist cultural studies approaches, or from broad interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives (gender studies, race and ethnic studies, postcolonial studies). Each volume sets out to ground and orientate the student through a broad range of specially commissioned articles and also to provide the more experienced scholar and teacher with a convenient and comprehensive overview of the latest trends and critical directions. An overarching Companion to Cultural Studies will map the territory as a whole.

1. A Companion to Film Theory

Edited by Toby Miller and Robert Stam

2. A Companion to Postcolonial Studies

Edited by Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray

3. A Companion to Cultural Studies

Edited by Toby Miller

4. A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies

Edited by David Theo Goldberg and John Solomos

5. A Companion to Art Theory

Edited by Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde

6. A Companion to Media Studies

Edited by Angharad Valdivia

7. A Companion to Literature and Film

Edited by Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo

8. A Companion to Gender Studies

Edited by Philomena Essed, David Theo Goldberg, and Audrey Kobayashi

9. A Companion to Asian American Studies

Edited by Kent A. Ono

10. A Companion to Television

Edited by Janet Wasko

11. A Companion to African American Studies

Edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon

12. A Companion to Museum Studies

Edited by Sharon Macdonald

13. A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies

Edited by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry

14. A Companion to Latina/o Studies

Edited by Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo

15. A Companion to Sport

Edited by David L. Andrews and Ben Carrington

16. A Companion to Diaspora

Edited by Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani

17. A Companion to Popular Culture

Edited by Gary Burns

Editor Biography

Paul Booth is Associate Professor at DePaul University, Chicago, USA. He is the author of Crossing Fandoms (Palgrave, 2016), Digital Fandom 2.0 (Peter Lang, 2016), Playing Fans (University of Iowa Press, 2015), Game Play (Bloomsbury, 2015), Time on TV (Peter Lang, 2012), and Digital Fandom (Peter Lang, 2010). He has edited Seeing Fans (Bloomsbury, 2016, with Lucy Bennett), Controversies in Digital Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2016, with Amber Davisson), and Fan Phenomena: Doctor Who (Intellect, 2013). He is currently enjoying a cup of coffee.

Contributor Biographies

Lucy Bennett is a lecturer in media audiences at JOMEC, Cardiff University, UK. Her work on fan cultures appears in journals such as New Media & Society, Journal of Fandom Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures, Social Semiotics, Continuum, Cinema Journal, Celebrity Studies and Participations. She is the co‐founder and co‐chair of the Fan Studies Network and is the co‐editor of Seeing Fans: Representations of Fandom in Media and Popular Culture (with Paul Booth, Bloomsbury, 2016) and Crowdfunding the Future (with Bertha Chin and Bethan Jones, Peter Lang, 2015).

Denise Bielby is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, and an affiliate of Film & Media Studies. Her research on media culture focuses on the industries and audiences of television and film. The author of numerous scholarly publications, her edited collection, Brokerage and Production in the American and French Entertainment Industries: Invisible Hands in Cultural Markets (Lexington Books, 2015, with Violaine Roussel), examines the activities of talent representatives and production professionals. A recipient of national awards for her research, she has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health, and was statistical consultant to the Writers Guild of America, West.

Mélanie Bourdaa is Associate Professor in Communication and Information Sciences at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France. She studies American TV, fandom in the digital age, and production strategies (transmedia storytelling). She co‐funded CATS (Cluster Aquitain du Transmedia Storytelling), a non‐profit organization to develop research and links to the media industries with transmedia and cross‐media strategies. She is the head of the Master Degree Designing Digital Projects. She coordinated (with Benjamin Derhy Kurtz) The Rise of the Transtexts: Challenges and Opportunities for Routledge. She is in charge of the research project MediaNum, aiming at studying cultural heritage and transmedia storytelling.

Daniel Cavicchi is Associate Provost for Research | Global | Practice at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA. His books include Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum; Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans; and My Music: Explorations of Music in Daily Life, with Charles Keil and Susan D. Crafts.

Bertha Chin is a Lecturer and Coordinator in Social Media in Swinburne University of Technology, Sarawak Campus. She has published extensively, is a board member of the Fan Studies Network, and co‐editor of Crowdfunding the Future: Media Industries, Ethics and Digital Society (2015, Peter Lang). Her research interests include fan and producer relationships, fan labor, social media, crowdfunding, antifandom, and transcultural fandom.

Francesca Coppa is Professor of English at Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania, PA, and a founding member of the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit established by fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and culture. She is the editor of The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (University of Michigan, 2017) and is currently writing a book on fan music video.

Ruth A. Deller is a Principal Lecturer and Program Leader for Journalism, Media and Public Relations at Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK. She has published on a range of media and journalism‐related topics, including religion and the media, reality and lifestyle television, and social media cultures. Her fan and audience studies research has looked at a range of fandoms, including Cliff Richard, Neighbours, Fifty Shades… and The Sims. Her own fandoms include Kylie Minogue, Doctor Who and Roxette.

Mark Duffett is a Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Chester, Chester, UK. His research interest is primarily in fandom and the dynamics of popular music audiences. Mark is the author of Understanding Fandom (Bloomsbury, 2013). In 2012, he was keynote speaker at the MARS conference in Finland. He has edited two special issues of the journal Popular Music and Society and two books: Popular Music Fandom (Routledge, 2015) and Fan Identities and Practices in Context (Routledge, 2016). He is currently working on a book about Elvis Presley for Equinox and a non‐academic book for Scarecrow Press called Counting Down Elvis: His 100 Finest Songs.

Alexandra Edwards received her PhD in English from the University of Georgia, Athens, USA. Her dissertation, “Fanaticism, Yes! Literary Fan Cultures of the Early Twentieth Century,” explores the alternative literary history of US media fandom from 1890–1949. She is best known for her transmedia work on The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Emma Approved, modernized, interactive webseries adaptations of Jane Austen’s beloved novels. Edwards won Primetime Emmy Awards in 2013 and 2015 for these shows.

Edmond Ernest dit Alban is a PhD candidate in the Film and Moving Images PhD program at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He studies various objects relevant to Japanese popular cultures, like otaku and dôjin cultures. He obtained his Masters degree working on the visual novel Higurashi no naku koro ni and its media mix history at Paris Diderot and Meiji University. His new project reassembles the subcultural history of Shônenai manga and fanzine for girls with the emergence of the otaku sanctuary of Ikebukuro’s Otome Road (the Girl’s Road) to explain how such niche media circulation has created the actual media mix strategies of Otome games (visual novels for girls).

Katharina Freund is a researcher on fandom, television culture, and digital communication, and education technologies. She completed her dissertation on fan video editing from the University of Wollongong, Australia, and has published on fan communities, online fandom, and copyright. Katharina now works as a Senior Learning Designer at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, designing education technology initiatives.

Ross Garner is a Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK. He has published articles on cult media forms in journals, including Popular Communication and Cinema Journal and has contributed chapters to multiple edited collections published by I.B. Tauris. He is preparing the monograph Nostalgia, Digital Television and Transmediality for publication by Bloomsbury and is also currently researching overlaps between media tourism and transmediality.

Lincoln Geraghty is a Reader in Popular Media Cultures in the School of Media and Performing Arts at the University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK. He is author of numerous books, including Living with Star Trek (I.B. Tauris, 2007), American Science Fiction Film and Television (Berg, 2009) and Cult Collectors (Routledge, 2014). He has edited numerous titles including The Influence of Star Trek on Television, Film and Culture (McFarland, 2008) and, with Mark Jancovich, The Shifting Definitions of Genre (McFarland, 2008). His most recent collection, entitled Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts, was published by Palgrave in 2015.

C. Lee Harrington received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California‐Santa Barbara, and is a faculty member at Miami University, Ohio, USA. Her research is on media/television studies and audience/fan studies, with a current interest in aging, death, and media. With Denise D. Bielby, she is the author of Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Everyday Life (Temple University Press, 1995) and Global TV: Exporting Television and Culture in the World Market (New York University Press, 2008). She is the co‐editor of several anthologies on popular culture, fan studies, soap opera, and aging and media. Her research has been published in a variety of media and communications journals.

Karen Hellekson, an independent scholar, has published on science fiction, media studies, and Doctor Who. She is the founding coeditor of Transformative Works and Cultures, an Open Access Gold media studies journal. She lives in Maine.

Matt Hills is Professor of Media and Film at the University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK, and co‐director of the Centre for Participatory Culture. He is the author of six books ranging from Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002) to Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and is the editor of New Dimensions of Doctor Who (I.B. Tauris, 2013). Matt has published more than 100 articles/chapters in the areas of cult media and fandom, and is currently working on the book Sherlock: Detecting Quality TV as well as a follow‐up to Fan Cultures which will be called Fan Studies.

Anne Jamison is Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, where she teaches courses on literature, popular culture, and literary theory. She is the author of Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Smart Pop, 2013). Her other publications include Kafka’s Other Prague: Writings from the Czechoslovak Republic (Northwestern, 2018), Poetics en passant (Palgrave, 2010), and articles on French, British, German, and Czech literature and culture. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, where she has also taught fanfiction as a visiting professor.

Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Art and Education at the University of Southern California, USA, and the founder and former co‐director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, USA. He is the author and editor of 17 books on various aspects of media and popular culture. His writing on fandom and media audiences includes Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Routledge, 1992), Science Fiction Audiences (with John Tulloch, 1995), Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers (2008), Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2008), Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture (with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, New York University Press. 2013), Participatory Culture in a Networked Era (with danah boyd and Mimi Ito, Polity Press, 2015), and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (with Sangita Shresthova, Neta Kligler‐Vilenchik, Liana Gamber‐Thompson, and Arely Zimmerman, New York University Press, 2016). He blogs regularly at henryjenkins.org.

Bethan Jones is a PhD candidate at the University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK. Her thesis examines cult television, fandom, nostalgia, and the X‐Files and Twin Peaks revivals. Bethan has published extensively on fandom, gender and new media. Among others, her work has appeared in the journals Sexualities, Transformative Works and Cultures, and New Media & Society, as well as in edited collections for Bloomsbury, Routledge and Palgrave. She also co‐edited the collection Crowdfunding the Future: Media Industries, Ethics, and Digital Society (Peter Lang, 2015). Bethan is a board member of the Fan Studies Network and a principal researcher in the World Star Wars Project.

Melanie E.S. Kohnen is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies at Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon, USA. She researches how the media industry and millennial audiences negotiate diversity in relationship to cultural identities, digital entertainment platforms, and technological infrastructures. Her book Queer Representation, Visibility, and Race in American Film and Television: Screening the Closet was published by Routledge in 2015. Her work has also appeared in Creative Industries Journal, Media Industries, and Journal of Popular Television. She shares her creative work at vimeo.com/mesk.

Nicolle Lamerichs is a Lecturer and Head of Media at International Communication and Media at HU University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht, the Netherlands. She is the author of Productive Fandom: Intermediality and Affective Reception in Fan Cultures (Maastricht University Press, 2014), as well as various articles on the creative aspects of fandom and game culture. Her research focuses on participatory culture and new media, specifically the nexus between popular culture, storytelling, and play.

Katherine Larsen teaches at George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA, and is the principal editor of The Journal of Fandom Studies. Along with Lynn Zubernis, she has co‐written Fandom at the Crossroads (Cambridge Scholars, 2012) and Fangasm: Supernatural Fangirls (University of Iowa Press, 2013), and co‐edited Fan Culture: Theory/Practice (Cambridge Scholars, 2012), and Fan Phenomena: Supernatural (Intellect, 2014). With Paul Booth, she is series editor of the Fandom and Culture series for University of Iowa Press.

Miranda Ruth Larsen is a PhD Candidate in the Information, Technology, and Society in Asia program at the University of Tokyo, and a Lecturer in English Communications at Bunkyo Gakuin University, Japan. Her research focuses on physical sites of affective transcultural exchange, specifically the male K‐pop idol scene in Tokyo. She previously earned an MA in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Casey J. McCormick earned her PhD in Cultural Studies at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Her work traces the histories of participatory media and audience practices. She is a contributor to Time in Television Narrative (University of Mississippi Press, 2012), The Netflix Effect (Bloomsbury, 2015), and Participations: International Journal of Audience Research (2016). Casey is a co‐founder of the Fan and Audience Studies Scholarly Interest Group at Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Alan McKee is an expert on entertainment and healthy sexual development and Associate Dean (Research and Development) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. He holds an Australian Research Council Discovery grant entitled “Pornography’s effects on audiences: explaining contradictory research data”; and a Linkage grant with True (previously Family Planning Queensland) to investigate the use of vulgar comedy to reach young men with information about healthy sexual development. He was co‐editor of the Girlfriend Guide to Life and Pornography: Structures, Agency and Performance (Polity, 2015). He has published on healthy sexual development, the effects of pornography on young people, and entertainment education for healthy sexuality in journals including The Archives of Sexual Behavior, The International Journal of Sexual Health, The Journal of Sex Research and Sex Education.

Lori Morimoto is an independent researcher of transcultural fan cultures and transnational media marketing. She has published essays on transcultural fandom and Japanese female fandom of overseas stars for Transformative Works and Cultures and Participations, as well as on transnational Japanese cinema for Scope and Asian Cinema.

Rukmini Pande completed her PhD on Intersections of Identity in Media Fandom Communities at the University of Western Australia and currently is an Assistant Professor at O.P. Jindal Global University. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Fandom Studies and has published in multiple edited collections on Race in Media Fandom, including Seeing Fans (edited by Paul Booth and Lucy Bennett) and Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (ed. Anne Jamison). Additionally, she has co‐authored an article, “‘Yes, the Evil Queen is Latina!’: Racial dynamics of online femslash fandoms” in a special issue of the journal Transformative Works and Cultures (June 2017). Her dissertation is also under contract to be published as a monograph with the University of Iowa Press.

Roberta Pearson is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK. Among her most recent publications are the co‐authored Star Trek and American Television (University of California Press, 2014), and the co‐edited Many More Lives of the Batman (BFI, 2015) and Storytelling in the Media Convergence Age: Exploring Screen Narratives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). She is in total the author, co‐author, editor or co‐editor of 13 books, and author or co‐author of over 80 journal articles and book chapters. Among these are several recent essays on Sherlock Holmes and Sherlockian fandom.

Tom Phillips is a Lecturer in Humanities at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. His research interests include online fan cultures and the intersection of fandom and celebrity. He is the co‐chair of the Fan Studies Network, and his work has been published in Participations, Celebrity Studies, and Transformative Works and Cultures.

Jessica Seymour is an Australian researcher and lecturer at HU University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Her research interests include children’s and YA literature, fan studies, and popular culture. She has contributed chapters to several edited collections, which range in topic from Supernatural, to Doctor Who, to ecocriticism in the works of JRR Tolkien.

Mel Stanfill is an Assistant Professor of Texts and Technology and Digital Media at the University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA, and holds a PhD in Communications and Media from the University of Illinois, Urbana‐Champaign. Stanfill’s research lies at the intersection of digital media, critical media industry studies, and fan/audience studies; it investigates the articulation of fans, users, and audiences to the media industry in the digital media era through technology, heteronormativity, whiteness, consumption, law, and labor; and has appeared in venues such as New Media and Society, Cinema Journal, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Transformative Works and Cultures.

Louisa Stein is Associate Professor of Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA. Her work on gender and generation in media culture and transmedia authorship has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is a book review editor for Cinema Journal and the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures. She is co‐editor of the collections Teen Television (McFarland, 2008) and Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom (McFarland, 2012). Her book Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age was published by the University of Iowa Press in Fall 2015.

Marc Steinberg is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He is the author of Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) and Naze Nihon wa “media mikkusu suru kuni” nano ka [Why is Japan a “Media Mixing Nation”?] (KADOKAWA, 2015). He is editor of the volume, Media Theory in Japan (Duke University Press, 2017).

Tisha Turk is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, Morris, USA, where she teaches courses on writing, composition studies, fandom, and gender studies. She has worked with legal teams from the Organization for Transformative Works and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to win Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemptions granting vidders and other remix artists the right to break copy protection on media files. She is writing a book about vidding and vidwatching.

Rebecca Williams is a Senior Lecturer in Communication, Culture and Media Studies at the University of South Wales, Cardiff, UK. She is the author of Post‐object Fandom: Television, Identity and Self‐Narrative (Bloomsbury, 2015) and editor of Torchwood Declassified (I.B. Tauris, 2013) and After the End: Transitions, Endings, and Resurrections in Fandom (University of Iowa Press, 2017). She is currently writing Theme Park Fandom: Distinction, Immersion & Participatory Culture for the University of Amsterdam Press.

Katie Wilson is a PhD Candidate in the Humanities program, the University of Louisville, Kentucky, USA, currently completing a dissertation on how fans address social and political issues though their fan activities. She received her MA in Media and Cinema Studies from DePaul University, Chicago, USA, and has taught classes in public speaking, interpersonal communication, and film.

Lynn Zubernis is a clinical psychologist and Professor of Counselor Education at West Chester University, Pennsylvania, USA. She is the editor of Family Don’t End with Blood: Cast and Fans on How Supernatural Has Changed Lives (Smart Pop, 2017), and is co‐editor (with Travis Langley) of Supernatural Psychology (Sterling, 2017). Together with Katherine Larsen, she has co‐written Fandom at the Crossroads (Cambridge Scholars, 2012) and Fangasm: Supernatural Fangirls (University of Iowa Press, 2013), and co‐edited Fan Culture: Theory/Practice (Cambridge Scholars, 2012) and Fan Phenomena: Supernatural (Intellect, 2014).

My very appreciative thanks to the following without whom this volume would not have been possible:

To the contributors to this volume, who were stalwart in their edits and thoughtful in their chapters;

To my superstar readers: Francesca Coppa, Alexandra Edwards, Katie Freund, Lori Morimoto, and Mel Stanfill, who went above and beyond reading chapters;

To my research assistant Monika Sziron, whose careful eye kept errors from the manuscript;

To the folks at Wiley who made the production process painless: Emily Corkhill, Jayne Fargnoli, and Rebecca Harkin;

To DePaul University’s University Research Council and my colleagues in the College of Communication, who granted me a quarter’s leave to work on the book;

To my family, who have always been there for me: Colin and Deborah Booth, Anna and Jason Bird, Thomas Vincent, and Wendy Vincent;

To the newest member of my family, young nephew Hank Bird, who is the cutest member of the family by far;

To my furry family, all of whom are dear to me: Slinky, Rosie, Gizmo, and Black Kitty;

Finally, and foremost, to my wife Katie Booth, who has had to deal with long hours of editing, questions about obscure vocabulary, and too many conversations about fandom to even count. Thank you to all!