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Interviews with scholars of popular culture about their new books.
Bigfoot is an instantly recognizable figure. Through the decades, this elusive primate has been featured in movies and books, on coffee mugs, beer koo…
How abstract design decisions in 2D platform games create rich worlds of meaning for players.Since the 1980s, 2D platform games have captivated their …
Following the success of their instantly iconic double LP, London Calling, The Clash set out to do something "triply outrageous." Named after the Nica…
This instalment of the Object Lessons series focuses on the Swimming Pool (Bloomsbury, 2024). The book explores the pool as a place where humans seek…
Long before internet archives and the anytime, anywhere convenience of streaming, people collected, traded, and shared radio and television content vi…
It’s the UConn Popcast, and Taylor Swift is by some measures the most popular person on the planet. Her periodic reinventions set the mass cultural te…
Tell It to the World: The Broadway Musical Abroad (Oxford UP, 2024) offers a look at how the Broadway musical travels the world, influencing and even …
Recent years have brought an upsurge in celebrity activism. Not a day goes by without an actor or musician taking to a stage, a podium or the internet…
Part Two of director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films embeds viewers among the Fremen, the Indigenous inhabitants of the planet Arrakis. The sole source …
How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race (U California Press, 2023) examines the programming practices at commercial radio stations in the 198…
Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imag…
With comics franchises getting turned into multi-billion dollar revenue opportunities and consumer technology companies dominating daily headlines — t…
In Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture–and the Magic That Makes It Work (FSG, 2023), Jesse David Fox—the country’s most definitive voice in come…
In his debut essay collection, My Life of Crime (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2022), Tyler C. Gore brings readers on an awkward visit to a nude beach. A bi…
Today, being authentic has become an aspiration and an imperative. The notion of authenticity shapes the consumption habits of individuals in the most…
Eve Benhamou's book Contemporary Disney Animation: Genre, Gender and Hollywood (Edinburgh UP, 2022) is the first in-depth study of Disney’s latest ani…
Can a song trigger a murder? Can a poem spark a riot? Can a book divide a people? Away from the gaze of mainstream urban media, across India's dusty, …
Hearing Luxe Pop: Glorification, Glamour, and the Middlebrow in American Popular Music (U California Press, 2021) explores a deluxe-production aesthet…
1980s Bombay was a time when a wave of low-budget, gory horror films made by independent film producers such as the Ramsay Brothers swept the B-movie …
Why are some things cute, and others not? What happens to our brains when we see something cute? And how did cuteness go global, from Hello Kitty to D…