Georgina Adlam (member, Humanities Center Pop Culture Working Group)

TBA

 

Lisa Alexander (member, Humanities Center Pop Culture Working Group)

Lisa Doris Alexander is an Associate Professor in the African American Studies Department. She is the author of the book When Baseball Isn’t White, Straight, and Male: The Media and Difference in the National Pastime and the upcoming book entitled Expanding the Black Film Canon: Race and Genre Across Six Decades.

 

Kevin Ball (member, Humanities Center Pop Culture Working Group)

TBA

 

Shelby Cadwell (Lead Organizer of Conference Planning Committee, member of Humanities Center Pop Culture Working Group)

Tabitha Cassidy (member, Humanities Center Pop Culture Working Group & Conference Planning Committee)

Tabitha Lynn Cassidy is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at Wayne State University. Her research focuses on transmedia storytelling, political communication, historical media practices, and advertising. Tabitha teaches courses in film, new media, and web design at WSU, and organizational communication and social media strategies as a graduate adjunct professor at Liberty University. She is also the Director of Digital Communication at a local Michigan advertising company, and freelances as a web developer and creative consultant when time allows. Currently, Tabitha is finishing her dissertation on cultivation theory within the transmedia storytelling worlds of Harry Potter and Doctor Who.

 

Elizabeth Drake (member, Conference Planning Committee)

Elizabeth Drake is a first year PhD student interested in popular culture studies, queer theory, critical race, gender, & sexuality studies, and film. She got her MA at San Diego State in American Literature and is still adjusting to Detroit’s cold weather. She has two dogs named Franky and Ranger.

 

Chera Kee (faculty adviser of Conference Planning Committee, founder of Humanities Center Pop Culture Working Group)

Chera Kee is an Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies in the English Department, where she teaches courses on popular culture, identity, and horror.  Her article on using zombies as stand-ins for bodies of color, “Good Girls Don’t Date Dead Boys: Toying with Miscegenation in Zombie Films,” appears in the December 2014 issue of the Journal of Popular Film and Television and her book, Not Your Average Zombie: Rehumanizing the Undead from Voodoo to Zombie Walks was published by the University of Texas Press in 2017.

 

John Landreville (member, Conference Planning Committee)

TBA

 

Matt Linton (member, Humanities Center Pop Culture Working Group & Conference Planning Committee)

Matt Linton is pursuing a PhD in Film and Media Studies at Wayne State University. His primary interests are constructions and depictions of race in comics and films, biopolitics, and visual narratives. He has previously presented at Narrative, the UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, and MPCA. He is also the President and co-founder of the Wayne State Comics Collective.

Contact Info: matt.linton@wayne.edu

 

Connor Newton (member, Conference Planning Committee)

Connor Newton is pursuing an MA in English at Wayne State University, with a focus on creative nonfiction writing. His primary research interests include memory, media, and the American Spiritualist movement, as well as the Belgian diaspora in Detroit. He is a member of the Wayne State Comics Collective and the Fairy Tale Studies Working Group at Wayne.

 

Steven Proudfoot (member, Conference Planning Committee)

Steven Proudfoot recently graduated from Wayne State University with a BA double major in Psychology and English. Steven takes an interdisciplinary lens to Game Studies and Fan Studies using the approaches of both of his majors, examples including game studies papers on ARG’s and negative emotion along with a social psychology survey on motivations for and attitudes about Fan Personality Quizzes. Other than exploring strange intersections of academia, Steven enjoys and likes to talk about games, anime, and anything else people are fans of.

 

Amber Taylor (member, Conference Planning Committee)

Amber Taylor is a high school instructor and private tutor. She received her BA in French and English from Wayne State University. Her research interests include French and American twentieth century fiction, transatlantic studies, critical race theory, and ideologies of identity. She loves studying foreign languages and has translated two articles from French to English for Against the Current. When she’s not camped out at the library, Amber likes watching great animation and hanging with her family.

 

Elena Past (member, Humanities Center Pop Culture Working Group)

Elena Past is Associate Professor of Italian in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. She has published articles on the toxic waste crisis in Naples, Mediterranean cinema and ecocinema, and Italian crime fiction and film. She is the author of Methods of Murder: Beccarian Introspection and Lombrosian Vivisection in Italian Crime Fiction (2012) and Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human(2019), and co-editor of Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film (2014) and Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies (2018).