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About Rebekah Buchanan

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. She has written extensively on popular culture in the classroom, youth’s out of school literacy practices, music-based pedagogy, and punk, including her book "Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics" (Peter Lang, 2018). She's a diehard Cubs fan and misses The Winchester Brothers.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

Rebekah's website

NBN Episodes hosted by Rebekah:

Popular Culture April 28, 2022

I'm Not Holding Your Coat

My Bruises-And-All Memoir of Punk Rock Rebellion

Nancy Barile

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
Nancy Barile shares her love of hardcore punk in her new memoir, I'm Not Holding Your Coat: My Bruises and All Memoir of Punk Rock Rebellion (Bazillion Points, 2022). From disaffected Catholic schoolgirl …
Popular Culture April 19, 2022

Taking a Stand

Contemporary US Stand-Up Comedians As Public Intellectuals

Jared N. Champion and Peter C. Kunze

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
Stand-up comedians have a long history of walking a careful line between serious and playful engagement with social issues: Lenny Bruce questioned the symbolic valence of racial slurs, Dick Gregory …
Popular Culture April 18, 2022

A Concise Dictionary of Comics

Nancy Pedri

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
Written in straightforward, jargon-free language, Nancy Pedri's A Concise Dictionary of Comics (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) guides students, researchers, readers, and educators of all ages and at all levels of comics …
Popular Culture April 15, 2022

Hell of a Hat

The Rise of '90s Ska and Swing

Kenneth Partridge

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
In the late ’90s, third-wave ska broke across the American alternative music scene like a tsunami. In sweaty clubs across the nation, kids danced themselves dehydrated to the peppy rhythms …
Popular Culture April 5, 2022

In Praise of Good Bookstores

Jeff Deutsch

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
In In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton University Press, 2022), Jeff Deutsch, the director of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago, aims to make the case for the value of spaces …
Popular Culture March 16, 2022

Speaking Truths

Young Adults, Identity, and Spoken Word Activism

Valerie Chepp

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
In Speaking Truths: Young Adults, Identity, and Spoken Word Activism (Rutgers UP, 2022), sociologist Valerie Chepp goes behind-the-scenes to uncover how spoken word poetry--and young people's participation in it--contributes to …
Popular Culture March 15, 2022

Mike McCartney's Early Liverpool

Mike McCartney

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
Mike McCartney's Early Liverpool (Genesis Publications, 2021), brings together all of his finest work including a wealth of previously unseen photographs and treasured drawings. McCartney takes us from his very first …
Popular Culture March 10, 2022

Haunted Homes

Dahlia Schweitzer

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
In her new book, Haunted Homes (Rutgers University Press, 2022), Dahlia Schweitzer explores the ways in which the trope of the haunted house in horror signifies the anxieties, traumas, and terrors of suburban …
Popular Culture February 9, 2022

Fan Sites

Film Tourism and Contemporary Fandom

Abby S. Waysdorf

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
In her new book, Fan Sites: Film Tourism and Contemporary Fandom (U Iowa Press, 2021)(University of Iowa Press, 2021), Abby Waysdorf explores why and how we experience film and television-related places, and …
Popular Culture January 18, 2022

Punk! Las Américas Edition

Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa, Rodrigo Quijano, and Shane Greene

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
In PUNK! Las Americas Editions (Intellect Books, 2021), editors Olga Rodrguez-Ulloa, Rodrigo Quijano, and Shane Greene have compiled a collection of academic essays and punk paraphernalia (including interviews, zines, poetry, and visual segments) …
Popular Culture January 7, 2022

Dressed for Freedom

The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism

Einav Rabinovitch-Fox

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
In Dressed for Freedom: The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism (University of Illinois Press, 2021), Einav Rabinovitch-Fox examines how clothes empowered women, and particularly women barred from positions of influence due …
Popular Culture December 24, 2021

The Sisters Are Alright, 2nd Edition

Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

Tamara Winfrey Harris

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
In the second edition of her book, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America (Berrett-Koehler, 2021), Tamara Winfrey Harris interviews over 100 diverse Black women …
Popular Culture November 26, 2021

Chick TV

Antiheroines and Time Unbound

Yael Levy

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
Yael Levy examines the underexplored antiheroine of early twenty-first century television in Chick-TV: Antiheroines and Time Unbound (Syracuse UP, 2022). Levy advances antiheroines to the forefront of television criticism, revealing the varied and subtle …
Popular Culture November 5, 2021

Raver Girl

Coming of Age in the 90s

Samantha Durbin

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
A ’90s time capsule buried inside a coming-of-age memoir set against the neon backdrop of the San Francisco Bay Area's rave scene, Raver Girl (She Writes Press, 2021) chronicles Samantha’s double life …
Popular Culture October 26, 2021

Rebel Music in the Triumphant Empire

Punk Rock in the 1990s United States

David Pearson

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
In Rebel Music in the Triumphant Empire (Oxford University Press, 2020), musicologist David Pearson explores the changing landscape of punk in the United States in the 1990s. Pearson examines how the 1990s underground …
Popular Culture October 12, 2021

The Punk Reader

Research Transmissions from the Local and the Global

Russ Bestley, Mike Dines, Alastair “Gords” Gordon, and Paula Guerra

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
Intellect’s Global Punk Series (2019-present) has produced edited collections of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work into local, national, global, and trans-global punk scenes. Series editors, Russ Bestley, Mike Dines, Alastair “Gords” …
Popular Culture September 28, 2021

Politics as Sound

The Washington, DC, Hardcore Scene, 1978-1983

Shayna Maskell

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
Washington, DC is known as the birthplace of hardcore punk. The raw, innovative, new sound coming out of the nation’s capital in the late 1970s is examined in Shayna Maskell’s …
Popular Culture September 24, 2021

Perspectives on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Nuanced Postnetwork Television

Amanda Konkle and Charles Burnetts

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
The new collection, Perspectives on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Nuanced Postnetwork Television (Syracuse University Press, 2021) by Amanda Konkle and Charles Burnetts explores the hit series with an off-putting title and a decidedly retrograde …
Popular Culture September 20, 2021

A Very Nervous Person's Guide to Horror Movies

Mathias Clasen

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
Horror fans are attracted to movies designed to scare us, but others shudder already at the thought of the sweat-drenched nightmares that terrifying movies often trigger. The fear of sleepless nights …
Popular Culture September 15, 2021

Leatherface Vs. Tricky Dick

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as Political Satire

Martin Harris

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
The Watergate scandal was a horror show. What better way to satirize it than with a horror movie? The Texas Chain Saw Massacre written by Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel premiered in …
Popular Culture September 6, 2021

The Cultural Impact of Rupaul's Drag Race

Why Are We All Gagging?

Cameron Crookston

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
In The Cultural Impact of RuPaul's Drag Race: Why are we all Gagging? (Intellect, 2021) Cameron Crookston has compiled chapters from scholars in theatre and performance studies, English literature, cultural anthropology …
Popular Culture July 12, 2021

Punks in Peoria

Making a Scene in the American Heartland

Jonathan Wright and Dawson Barrett

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
In Punks in Peoria: Making a Scene in the American Heartland (University of Illinois, 2021) Jonathan Wright and Dawson Barret explore do-it-yourself scene built by Peoria punks, performers, and scenesters in the …
Popular Culture July 9, 2021

Teen TV

Stefania Marghitu

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
Stefania Marghitu's Teen TV (Routledge, 2021)explores the history of television's relationship to teens as a desired, but elusive audience, and the ways in which television has embraced youth subcultures, tracing …
Popular Culture June 25, 2021

Typical Girls

The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips

Susan E. Kirtley

Hosted by Rebekah Buchanan
In her new book Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips (Ohio State Press, 2021) Susan Kirtley examines female-created comics that were nationally syndicated starting in the late 1970s-2010. Kirtley uncovers …