Jan Blaschak (member, Conference Planning Committee)
Jan Blaschak teaches Composition at Wayne State University and Adrian College. She has a lifelong love of mystery, science fiction and fantasy literature. Her research interests include the history of women’s rhetoric and publishing and medieval literature. She also regularly takes a stab at poetry and songwriting. Sometimes they stab back.
Courtney Bliss (member, Conference Planning Committee)
Courtney Bliss, MA, is an American Culture Studies PhD candidate at Bowling Green State University. She earned a MA in Popular Culture Studies from BGSU. She is a popular culture scholar whose work examines how popular culture has the potential to connect audiences with experiences similar to and different from their own. Her thesis, Reframing Normal: The Inclusion of Deaf Culture in the X-Men Comic Books, explores how American Deaf Culture has been unintentionally included in the X-Men comics since the first issue. Currently she is researching theater fandom through Hamilton: An American Musical and the phenomenon it has become.
Shelby Cadwell (co-chair, Conference Planning Committee)
Shelby is a Ph.D Candidate at Wayne State University in English. Her research focus is in Film & Media, Comics Studies, and Science Fiction Studies. She is the co-chair of the annual Wayne State Popular Culture Conference and President of Kino Club 313, Wayne State’s Film & Media Studies student group. Her published work can be found in Science Fiction Film & Television. Her dissertation, titled “NeoAfrofuturist Ecologies,” deals with gender, race, and environment in Afrofuturist film, music videos, television, comics, and novels.
Contact Info: shelby.cadwell@wayne.edu
Chera Kee (faculty adviser, Conference Planning Committee)
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.
Bernadette Kelly (member, Conference Planning Committee)
Trinidad Linares (member, Conference Planning Committee)
Trinidad Linares (M.A., Popular Culture) is Area Chair for Subculture and 9/11 in Popular Culture for the Midwest PCA/ACA Conference 2021. She presented at the Global Responses to 9/11 and the War on Terror: Literary, Media, and Film Perspectives Conference (BGSU) and spoke at the Frederick Douglass Institute (Slippery Rock University) and the Asian Cultural Engagement Center (Virginia Tech). Her artwork “Paranoia is Not Patriotism: The Murder of José Antonio Elena Rodríguez” was displayed at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She has a chapter in Buffy to Batgirl: Essays on Female Power, Evolving Femininity and Gender Roles in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2019).
Matt Linton (co-chair, 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, the Comics Studies Society Conference and MPCA. His chapter “Blood and Fire: Monstrous Women in Carrie and ‘The Dark Phoenix Saga'” was published in Gender and Contemporary Horror in Comics, Games and Transmedia in 2019. He is also the President and co-founder of the Wayne State Comics Collective.
Contact Info: matt.linton@wayne.edu
Sean O’Brien (member, Conference Planning Committee)