Dr Rebecca Williams

a cartoon character says " mind if i ask you a few questions ? " ALT: a cartoon character says " mind if i ask you a few questions ? "

Did you know we have lots of other events going on during our #FSNNA2025 #FanStudies Conference in addition to our headliners?

For ex/ we've got a Q&A event happening Thurs Oct 23 (9-10am ET) with @pbooth81.bsky.social titled
"Publishing with the Bloomsbury Fan Primer Series"

Next in #TWC46, Caitlin Joyce's ethnographic study of a #BL community reveals how queer men use BL texts to explore their identities and desires. Read Joyce's article, ""I wish my life was like this": Queer identity work in BL fandom," here:

Casual posting on social media: Why the ‘what I ate for lunch’ photo is too cringe Posting on social media has evolved among millennials and Gen Z from sharing mundane moments and life updates to curated, aesthetically pleasing performances

www.mid-day.com/amp/sunday-m...

CFP: SFFTV special issue on Digital Media and New Horror

liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/pb-assets/do...

Ustopians of Today: From Fantasy to Reality, Female Cosplay in Romania Futuristic creations, be they literary, cinematic, or any other performative production, incorporate an escapist feature and feed audiences’ imagination not only by transporting them to ustopian temporalities but also by creating characters whose identities are...

New chapter ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Grosu-Rădulescu, LM. (2025). Ustopians of Today: From Fantasy to Reality, Female Cosplay in Romania. In: Nanda, A., Grosu-Rădulescu, LM. (eds) Inhabiting Ustopia: Science Fiction in Film, Performing Arts, and Digital Media.

#FanStudies

doi.org/10.1007/978-...

This is a great opportunity to plug Suzanne and Naomi Jacobs' edited special issue on AI in the latest issue of TWC 🔥 journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/tw...
#FanStudies #FanLIS

Between Ustopia and the Affective Heterotopia: Vtubing and its Fandom What happens when technological advancements bring sci-fi entities to life in a real-imagined scenario? Enter the VTuber, short for Virtual Youtuber, a type of content producer that blurs the boundaries between the real, the virtual, and the fantastic—using...

New book chapter ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Teodorescu, A. (2025). Between Ustopia and the Affective Heterotopia: Vtubing and its Fandom. In: Nanda, A., Grosu-Rădulescu, LM. (eds) Inhabiting Ustopia: Science Fiction in Film, Performing Arts, and Digital Media.

#FanStudies

doi.org/10.1007/978-...

Five UK universities tell staff they can’t afford pay rises Negotiations over whether to honour 1.4 per cent increase ongoing at several other institutions amid financial crunch

'Staff at some institutions will not get even get the small rise due to them because of a clause in the negotiations that allows for a delay for up to 11 months if a university is facing financial difficulties.' So far, Dundee, Kent, Brunel, Coventry, Swansea.

Mazzy Star released ‘So Tonight That I Might See’ 32 years ago on October 5, 1993 | Listen to the album + revisit our tribute here: album.ink/MSsotonight

Our 2025 Fans of Color prize-winning Article was published in #TWC44, our special issue on “Centering Blackness in Fan Studies,” on December 15, 2024. You can read it here: buff.ly/sycJso7

‘Dust Bunny’ Trailer – Mads Mikkelsen Hunts Monsters in ‘Hannibal’ Creator Bryan Fuller’s Directorial Debut A 10-year-old girl joins forces with her hit man neighbor to confront each other’s monsters in the trailer for Dust Bunny. The film premieres tomorrow night at the Toronto International Film Festival ...

Bryan Fuller and his Hannibal star Mads Mikkelsen reunite in DUST BUNNY, a new monster movie directed by Fuller and releasing in theaters on December 5.

"What are these
So wither'd and so wild in their attire,
That look not like the inhabitants o' the earth,
And yet are on't?" Macbeth, Act 1, Scene III

🎞️ Hercules, 1997 #ShakespeareSunday

It’s Not Just Netflix—It’s Your Entire Life The streaming service is expanding beyond screens and into the real world. Will subscribers follow?

A few comments on fandom from me in this new piece @theatlantic.com

#FanStudies

www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025...

The Pluralism of Thai Boys Love Industry: Auteur Migration, Fan Showrunners, Labor Vulnerability, and Queer Potentiality - Wikanda Promkhuntong, 2025 This paper explores Boys Love media from Thailand through the lens of screen labor. This trajectory allows an examination of the pluralist landscape and complex...

New article ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Promkhuntong, W. (2025). The Pluralism of Thai Boys Love Industry: Auteur Migration, Fan Showrunners, Labor Vulnerability, and Queer Potentiality. Television & New Media, 0(0).

doi.org/10.1177/1527...

Followers, fans, friends, or haters? A typology of the online interactions and relationships between social media influencers and their audiences based on a social capital framework - Gaëlle Ouvrein, ... Little is known about the characteristics and dynamics within SMI–audience interactions and relationships from the side of SMI. Using interview data from 19 (N ...

New article ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Ouvrein, G. (2024). Followers, fans, friends, or haters? A typology of the online interactions and relationships between social media influencers and their audiences based on a social capital framework. New Media & Society, 27(10), 5659-5690.

#FanStudies

doi.org/10.1177/1461...

Admiration to Alienation: Assessing Fan Response to Celebrity Weight Loss Using Representation Theory Abstract. This chapter explores the complex dynamics of fan engagement with celebrity weight loss narratives on Instagram using media scholar Stuart Hall’s

T&T students @helloemi.bsky.social‬ and Carol Stinnett recently published "Admiration to Alienation: Assessing Fan Response to Celebrity Weight Loss Using Representation Theory." Check it out! www.emerald.com/books/edited...

Serial killers and the production of the uncanny in digital participatory culture - Laura Glitsos, Mark Deuze, 2025 Many theorists have expounded on what serial killing says about the social in any given context and the ways in which serial killing and media are entangled, in...

New article ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Glitsos, L., & Deuze, M. (2024). Serial killers and the production of the uncanny in digital participatory culture. New Media & Society, 27(10), 5691-5709.

doi.org/10.1177/1461...

Kristofer's & my second essay on pink kryptonite is now out! Thx #FanLIS for making it happen! #FanLIS2025 www.academia.edu/130086326/Ma...

Here it is! The proceedings from #FanLIS2025 are now up at ideaexchange.uakron.edu/docam/vol12/...!
Thank you to all the speakers who contributed to putting this out, and once again making #FanLIS what it is! 🥰🫡🥳

There’s the acronym IJCS, the title Online First, and the article: “Transcultural fan studies with a ‘Queer Asia’ focus in the 2020s”, by Jamie J. Zhao, City University of Hong Kong.

In our OnlineFirst section, you can access the very latest papers in the field. Check out the article “Transcultural fan studies with a ‘Queer Asia’ focus in the 2020s”, by Jamie J. Zhao.

doi.org/10.1177/1367...

#IJCSOnlineFirst

💚 K-Pop Fandom: Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today

👩🏻‍💻 By Areum Jeong

📚 University of Michigan Press, February 2026

press.umich.edu/Books/K/K-Po...

🙌🏻 Available for pre-order now!

Film International
Special Issue Calls for Papers: ‘Popular Music and Identity in Cinema’

We welcome submissions that explore the relationships between popular music and the representation and communication of identity in cinema.

Deadline: 1 Feb 2026

👉ow.ly/7tgE50WZjuC

Interesting new article in The Journal of American Cuture

'It's Like a Horror Movie That You Walk Through’: Experiencing Horror Through Immersive Recreation

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Book on a table, cover reads: Cassie Brummitt From Harry Potter to the Wizarding World The Transfiguration of a Franchise

Back cover of the book: From Harry Potter to the Wizarding World is a salient, long overdue analysis of the wealth and breadth of the story world in the post-book era, covering everything from online platform Pottermore, to its presence in Universal theme parks, the Studio Tour in Leavesden, the Cursed Child stage play, as well as the fledging Fantastic Beasts film series. Cassie Brummitt also convinces by reckoning with Rowling’s authorial control over the franchise, ever more important in light of her hateful and controversial presence in recent years. – Sabrina Mittermeier, author of A Cultural History of Disneyland Theme Parks The Harry Potter franchise is not confined to just the page or the screen, but has been and continues to be reimagined and reconfigured through a number of extratextual products, texts, and experiences which surround and rework the Harry Potter texts. This book centres around the 2010s, or the ‘post-Potter era’, a period of unprecedented growth and reinvention for the franchise. Many of the franchising developments produced during this time operated according to distinct strategies: to consolidate the legacy of the Harry Potter series, or to extend the fictional universe into new settings, media and cultural forms. This book explores six such developments - J.K. Rowling’s authorship, the website Pottermore, the ‘Wizarding World of Harry Potter’ theme parks, the Warner Bros. Studio Tour in Watford, the Fantastic Beasts films, and the stageplay Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – to shine a spotlight on a franchise in flux.

We‘d all like to make Rowling and her franchise disappear, but her transphobia & large-scale political influence and the reboot TV show make it hard to ignore from a scholarly perspective. Cassie Brummitt has written a salient study on what became of Harry Potter post-book that I got to blurb:

Clare Sears shines a light on how femslash writers view their labor and contributions to their communities in their #TWC46 Article, "Come as you are: Sex, race, and writing in f/f slash fan fiction communities"! Read it here:

NEWS: Anime versions of Disney Villains — Queen of Hearts, Scar, Ursula, Jafar, Evil Queen, Hades, and Maleficent — star in the new special "Disney Twisted Wonderland: The Animation," debuting on Disney+ and Hulu on Oct. 29.

British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowships The British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowships are intended to enable established scholars, needing relief from teaching and administration, to have the time to bring to completion a signi...

We’ve opened a call for our British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowships which enable established scholars to have the time to complete a significant piece of humanities or social sciences piece of research, through a one year period of leave
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche...

"Humbug" (1995.03.31)
S02|E20|2X20

Director: Kim Manners
Writer: Darin Morgan
Director of Photography: John S. Bartley
Art Director: Graeme Murray
#XFiles #TheXFiles

Inside the Contentious World of Luigi Mangione Supporters As Luigi Mangione is being tried legally and in the court of public opinion, tensions are growing between his supporters pushing health care reform and those who believe he is innocent.

New deep dive into the world of feuding Luigi Mangione supporters. Some are using alleged crime to push health care reform; others find that offensive, as they believe he's completely innocent. And most of them hate the media's fixation on the "thirsters": www.wired.com/story/inside...

Call for Papers

Scandalisation across media: New scandal trajectories, temporalities, and actors

Nordic Journal of Media Studies

www.nordicom.gu.se/en/latest/ne...