Fandom, The Next Generation: A Two-Part Event with Dr. Bridget Kies & Dr. Megan Connor

Friday, March 3 2023 10:30 - 11:30 AM (Panel) & 2:30 - 4:00 PM (Book Talk/Q&A)

Curtin Hall, Room 368

Fandom book cover.

Join us for a two-part event with visiting scholars & Panther alumni Dr. Bridget Kies (PhD 2018) & Dr. Megan Connor (MA 2015)! Both events will be held in Curtin Hall, Room 368.

10:30 – 11:30 AM: Career Panel (Curtin 368)

Participate in a panel discussion of our guests’ experiences with the academic and alt-academic job market and brainstorm ideas for post-graduate school careers. Coffee & Morning Snacks to be served.

2:30 – 4:00 PM: Book Talk / Q&A – Fandom, The Next Generation

Imagine a Millennial parent taking their child to see The Last Jedi after their Baby Boomer parents took them to see Return of the Jedi. Picture longtime friends attending a Backstreet Boys reunion concert as adults. For better or worse, reboots, remakes, and revivals are now a standard media industry practice. New modes of distribution and exhibition have further changed fans’ abilities to encounter or re-encounter media texts. Bridget Kies (UWM Phd 2018) and Megan Connor (UWM MA 2015) offer one of the first close studies of fan generations, looking at how these generations are influenced by and, in turn, influence technologies, industry practices, and social and political changes.

Bridget Kies is assistant professor of Film Studies and Production at Oakland University, where she also serves on the executive committee for the Women and Gender Studies program. Her research on sexualities and media fandoms has been published in the journals Feminist Media Histories, Science Fiction Film and Television, Journal of Popular Romance Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures, and Intensities, as well as several edited collections. With Megan Connor, she is co-editor of Fandom, the Next Generation (2022). She has also co-edited issues of Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture and Participations. She is currently writing a book about the enduring popularity of Murder, She Wrote.

Megan Connor received her PhD from Indiana University’s Media School, where she now serves as research coordinator at the Institute for Communication Research. Her research examines girls’ media, celebrity, and fandom. Her dissertation used an archive of teen magazines such as Seventeen and Teen Vogue to explore the construction and promotion of celebrity girlhood in the 2000s as an idealized form of youthful femininity. With Bridget Kies, Megan is co-editor of Fandom, the Next Generation (2022). Her work has been published in The Black Girlhood Studies Collection (2019) and the journal Black Camera, where she also served as managing editor for several years.