We welcome you to join us for our seventh annual pop culture conference Wayne Pop 2021: Disruptions, Gaps, Transitions, and Leaps to be held virtually from Friday, September 24th – Sunday, September 26th. This conference seeks to explore the ways in which popular media reflects political, historical, or technological disruptions, but also how popular media disrupts or revises traditional histories, fills in gaps, and participates in or even precipitates historical transitions and leaps. Wayne Pop 2021 is free to attend and will include synchronous and asynchronous content shared on our official website and YouTube channel.

The WaynePop2021 Conference Committee is pleased to announce that we have four confirmed special guest speakers for this year’s event. All guest speaker engagements will be held in our new “In Conversation With…” format, where an established scholar is interviewed by a graduate student or recent graduate in their respective field. The speakers for the event will be as follows:

Julian Chambliss (Professor, Michigan State University), Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural and Geopolitical Domain (Co-Editor – 2018); Cities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History (Co-Author – 2018).

Benjamin Han (Assistant Professor, Tulane University), Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America (Author – 2020).

Dan Hassler-Forest (Assistant Professor, Utrecht University), The Politics of Adaptation: Media Convergence and Ideology (Editor – 2015); Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics: Transmedia World-building Beyond Capitalism (Author – 2016).

Marita Sturken (Professor, New York University) Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Author – 2007); Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums, and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era (Author – forthcoming 2022).

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