Resources
Fandom Studies is by definition a highly interdisciplinary field. It spans a variety of well-established academic disciplines with their respective disciplinary boundaries, such as History, Audience Studies, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Music History, Gender & Queer Studies, Art History, Cinema Studies, Reception Studies, Literacy Studies – to name but a few. For this reason, it is a challenge to keep track of current research projects, interesting websites, possible publication venues, and the range of archives and libraries with (digitised) content relevant to historical fandom studies. The following overview is intended to help you find your way around.
Please let us know if you have any additional suggestions: fan-history@uni-koeln.de
Research projects
Fan mail to Danish film stars in the 1910s. Exploring the agency and practices of early film fans: https://www.fanmail1910s.de/
The project, financed by the German Research Foundation from 2024 to 2027, investigates the emergence of film fans in the 1910s as well as the establishment and formation of early film fan practices. Instead of relying on third-party accounts about film fans, as has been done in research so far, the investigation makes use of two extensive collections of fan mail to the Danish actors Olaf Fønss and Clara Wieth from the 1910s in the archives of the Danish Film Institute. This globally unique source material, supplemented by fan mail to Betty Nansen, Asta Nielsen, Valdemar Psilander and Carlo Wieth, totalling up to about 2,900 letters, not only makes it possible to reconstruct the agency and practices of early film fans and their sociological, cultural, gender and age diversity. At the same time, the difference to the media representation of ›the‹ fan and his/her fandom provides insights into the functionalization of the discourse on fans and fandom in the respective cultural, social and media-historical context.
Websites & Networks
AG Partizipations- und Fanforschung: https://partizipafans.wordpress.com
From the website: »[The] scholarly Fan and Participation Studies [...] working group was founded in 2015 within the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM). Our aim is to bring together early career and established researchers to discuss and work together on current and emerging issues within our common research fields of fan and participation studies. Over the years, numerous successful panels for the annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft have emerged from the working group, as well as two workshops and a digital format for discussing methodological questions (see Method Labs). In 2023, several workgroup members founded the OA journal Fandom I Cultures I Research (bilingual English/German, with peer-review process), which will be hosted via the media studies repository media/rep/ starting in fall 2024. The workgroup was founded in 2015 by Vera Cuntz-Leng, Sophie G. Einwächter and Sven Stollfuß. The workgroup leaders in 2024 are: Vera Cuntz-Leng & Sophie G. Einwächter«.
Fan mail to film stars in the 1910s: Letter examples and statistical graphs: https://www.fanmail1910s.de (see above: research projects)
Based on the project database, the website provides graphs about the fan mail sent to individual Danish stars. As this database is still under construction, the website currently only offers graphs about Asta Nielsen's, Betty Nansen's and Clara Wieth's fan mail. Graphs about Olaf Fønss' fan mail will be added until the end of 2025.
HoMER Network: History of Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception: https://www.homernetwork.org
From the website: »HoMER (History of Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception) is an international network of researchers interested in understanding the complex phenomena of cinema-going, exhibition, and reception, from a multidisciplinary perspective. HoMER has organized panels, conferences and workshops since 2004.
The annual HoMER conference is a great opportunity to meet other researchers, to share ideas and collaborate. Check out our Annual Conference page for information on how to participate.
Explore the HoMER Projects page to find out more about the research of HoMER members around the world. If you are working on any aspect of the history of moviegoing, exhibition and reception, we would love to hear from you. You can drop us an email, join the HoMER mailing list or share your research project with HoMER«
NoRMMA: Network of Research: Movies, Magazines and Audiences: https://normmanetwork.com
From the website: »We, NoRMMA, are a research network situated within the School of Arts at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. Founded in 2014, we particularly focus on the use of fan magazines for the purpose of film history research. As a group, we have organised a symposium (2014), an international conference (2015) and a series of public workshops (2017); currently, we are working on the Heritage Lottery-funded project Digitizing The War Illustrated, which will enable us to make a full run of the WW1-iteration of the magazine The War Illustrated available online in an open-access format. More information about each of these events can be found through their respective pages. For any further questions, please do drop us an email at normma.network@gmail.com, or find us on Facebook or Twitter.«
Journals
Fandom | Cultures | Research (since 2025): https://journals.uni-marburg.de/fcr/issue/view/328
From the website: »Fandom | Cultures | Research is the first international journal based in Germany for scholarship in the fields of Fan, Audience, Media, and Cultural (Data) Studies. With its different formats – ranging from full papers to reviews, conference reports, and data papers – the journal fosters academic discussion across these disciplines, especially regarding methodological questions: Each issue will consist of double-blind peer-reviewed full papers, alongside with an editorially reviewed section consisting of data papers (data sets and complementary text), reviews, conference reports, and a »Method Lab« section with shorter papers and interviews that provide insight into work-in-progress, methodological challenges, as well as best practices. Other creative format suggestions are also welcome. Furthermore, we invite themed guest sections for every issue.
Cultural interaction and participation in their myriad forms – from critical and affirmative audience responses to civic engagement and consumer activism – have become highly mediatised phenomena taking place in both analogue and digital spheres. Accordingly, doing research in the fields of Participation and Fan Studies requires a sensibility for media-specific contexts and a diverse set of methodological tools adapted to them. It also benefits a lot from interdisciplinary cooperation and discourse. The journal aims to foster synergies between all disciplines interested in fan phenomena, e.g., Media and Communication Studies, Sociology, and Digital Humanities among others, and invites contributions focusing on a wide range of fan cultural and civic practices, mainstream as well as niche identities and media. It is especially interested in digital platforms and infrastructures as frameworks for a diverse range of cultural practices and as a home to many fan, brand, and other communities.
Fandom | Cultures | Research is an openly accessible, bilingual online journal (English/German), published via the open access repository media/rep/ aiming to establish an innovative platform to further develop the understanding of situated cultural practice and ultimately, to negotiate the methodological foundations of their investigation.«
Journal of Fandom Studies (since 2012): https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-fandom-studies.
From the website: »The multi-disciplinary nature of fan studies makes the development of a community of scholars sometimes difficult to achieve. The Journal of Fandom Studies seeks to offer scholars a dedicated publication that promotes current scholarship into the fields of fan and audience studies across a variety of media. It focuses on the critical exploration, within a wide range of disciplines and fan cultures, of issues surrounding production and consumption of popular media (including film, music, television, sports and gaming), The journal aims to address key issues in fans studies itself, while also fostering new areas of enquiry that take us beyond the bounds of current scholarship.«
Our own commentary: 12 volumes sinces 2023, im Regelfall 3 issues per year, aber klarer Fokus auf Gegenwart.
Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies (since 2003): https://www.participations.org
From the website: »The purpose of Participations has always been, and continues to be, to provide a focal point – a coming-together-place – for all kinds of work under the general and generously understood heading of »audience and reception studies”« The Journal aims to include and embrace work across all fields of media and culture, from a wide range of theoretical and methodological bases, giving space to a full range of questions and debates. But – and it is an important qualification – coming together is not possible without recognising that audience and reception research has some distinctive, and even problematic histories. In talking to each other, in sharing our research and learning from each other, certain requirements are generated. [...]
Participations is interested in publishing all kinds of good audience or reception research and encourages authors to reflect on what they mean by these terms as part of the necessary dialogue about fundamental concepts. We are most interested in research which sees itself as contributing to a conversation and dialogue between approaches. We will consider but are less interested in work which is wholly enclosed, unreflexively, within one approach, and which never thinks about whether its findings might be of interest, use, or challenge to other people within our broad field.
Participations remains in important senses a project, a bit more than just an academic journal.«
Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History (since 2008): https://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_Reception.html
From the website: »Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal published once a year. It seeks to promote dialog and discussion among scholars engaged in theoretical and practical analyses in several related fields: reader-response criticism and pedagogy, reception study, history of reading and the book, audience and communication studies, institutional studies and histories, as well as interpretive strategies related to feminism, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and postcolonial studies, focusing mainly but not exclusively on the literature, culture, and media of England and the United States.
Reception is the official journal of the Reception Study Society, a non-profit organization that seeks to promote informal and formal exchanges between scholars in several related fields: reader-response criticism and pedagogy, reception study, the history of reading and the book, cultural studies, communication and media studies, and any other studies engaging these primary areas.«
Transformative Work and Cultures (since 2008): https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc
From the website: »Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is an international, peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works. TWC publishes articles about transformative works, broadly conceived and articles about the fan community. We invite papers in all areas, including fan fiction, fan vids, film, TV, anime, fan art, comic books, cosplay, fan community, music, video games, celebrities and machinima. We encourage a variety of critical approaches, including feminism, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial theory, audience theory, reader-response theory, literary criticism, film studies, and posthumanism. We also encourage authors to consider writing personal essays integrated with scholarship; hyperlinked articles; or other forms that test the limits of the genre of academic writing.«
Digitizations from Archives and Libraries
Media History Digital Library: https://mediahistoryproject.org
From the website: »For decades, researchers have relied on trade papers and fan magazines in writing the histories of film, media, and broadcasting. Industry trade papers, such as Variety and Film Daily, offer extensive documentation about the development of the media industries and their impact upon audiences and culture. Yet access to these sources remained limited. Scholars depended upon incomplete and low quality microfilm facsimiles. The majority of film and broadcasting magazines, which had never been transferred to microfilm, were only available at a handful of institutions. And none of the microfilm nor print copies were fulltext searchable. Instead, researchers had to turn page by page to look for relevant items to their research questions.
In 2009, film historian David Pierce sought to improve this research landscape by founding the Media History Digital Library. [...] He found generous individuals willing to fund the digitization of important magazine, and borrowed from the collections of the Museum of Modern Art Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library, and private collectors. Mr. Pierce also possessed 25 years of experience investigating the copyright status of books and films. Whereas most Hollywood movies from the 1920s through the 1950s were still under copyright protection, most of the trade papers and fan magazines of this period are in the public domain. This has enabled the MHDL to share its collections on an open access basis.
In 2011, Eric Hoyt joined David Pierce in leading the MHDL, and they collaborated on building a website and digitizing 200,000 pages of movie magazines. The Internet Archive agreed to serve as the scanning vendor and data hosting service, granting the MHDL its own sub-collection. When Hoyt accepted a position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he brought the software development projects with him that he was working on in collaboration with Wendy Hagenmaier and Carl Hagenmaier. In 2013, Hoyt and his team at UW-Madison launched Lantern, a search platform for the MHDL. In 2014, Hoyt and Charles Acland at Concordia University received a $200,000 Digging into Data grant, sponsored by IMLS and SSHRC, to build the Arclight app -— a data analytics platform that searches for trends across the MHDL’s collection. The MHDL’s platform improvement initiatives have also received funding from the Mary Pickford Foundation.
In 2017, the MHDL reached the milestone of expanding its collection to over 2 million pages. At the end of that year, David Pierce stepped down as MHDL director, and the project fully moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where it is now part of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Mr. Pierce continues to be a leader in the film archives community in his position at the Library of Congress as Assistant Chief at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center Packard Campus.
Two years later, in 2019, the MHDL received a $150,000 Digital Extension Grant from the American Council of Learned Societies in support of the "Globalizing and Enhancing the Media History Digital Library" initiative. The grant funding enabled a number of database and interface improvements, as well as the addition of dozens of non-English language magazines. Thank you to the team, led by Eric Hoyt and Kelley Conway, who worked on this initaitive and whose research will appear in the forthcoming open access book, Global Movie Magazine Networks.
Over the decade since launching its first website, the MHDL has had a transformative impact on the study of film and broadcasting history. The MHDL and Lantern have been recognized with major awards from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, International Association for Media and History, American Association of School Librarians, Popular Culture Association, and American Culture Association. Countless books, articles, conference presentations, and papers written by high school and college students have drawn from the collection’s freely accessible books and magazines. The sources we have digitized for open access, and the large-scale queries that our platforms allow, have enabled ambitious research projects and the production of new knowledge.«
Impressum