Featured Speakers

Paul Booth is a professor of Media and Pop Culture in the College of Communication and Associate Dean of Student Affairs and Engagement. He received his PhD in communication and rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He researches fandom, games, popular culture, and cultural studies. He teaches classes in media studies, television studies, board games, popular culture, new media, and participatory cultures. 

Booth is the author or editor of more than fifteen books, including Adventures Across Space and Time: A Doctor Who Reader (Bloomsbury, 2023), Board Games as Media (Bloomsbury, 2021); The Fan Studies Primer (University of Iowa Press, 2021); Watching Doctor Who (Bloomsbury, 2019); Wiley Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (Wiley, 2018);  Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games (2015, Bloomsbury);  Controversies in Digital Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2016); Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age (Univ. of Iowa Press, 2015); and Digital Fandom 2.0: New Media Studies (Peter Lang, 2016; 2010). He has also published over 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. 

He is the organizer of the annual DePaul Pop Culture Conference, where fans and scholars come together in thoughtful discussion of popular culture texts. Past conference topics have included time travel, Disney, Harry Potter, Star Trek, Supernatural, Doctor Who, slasher films, and superheroes. The 2024 conference is focused on Star Wars, occurring specifically on May 4th. Papers from the first five conferences were collected and published in Time Lords & Tribbles, Winchesters & Muggles: the DePaul Pop Culture Conference, A Five-year Retrospective, with the proceeds going to charity, and further volumes have been released for each additional conference.

Presenting on Thursday, March 28th at 4:45 PM in Chicago D.

Dr. Alexa Alice Joubin is the inaugural recipient of the PCA’s bell hooks Legacy Award and holder of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award. She is Professor of English, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she serves as founding Co-director of the Digital Humanities Institute. Her work on adaptation of the Western canon has been recognized by the Modern Language Association's Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies.Social justice and diversity are key components of Alexa's teaching, research, and service. She is a practitioner and advocate for open pedagogy and open education resources (OER). On campus, she has worked on initiatives to foster more inclusive and meaningful representation of racialized and gender minorities. At Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English, she holds the John M. Kirk, Jr. Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. She was appointed the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Warwick in the UK. She is an affiliate at MIT and at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has also served as distinguished visiting professor at the University of Essex in the UK, Yonsei University and Seoul National University in South Korea, and Beijing Normal University and Shandong University in China.

Presentation: Trans* Studies and Critical Race Theory at the Crossroad in Pop Culture

Date/Time: Friday, March 29th at 11:30 AM

Location: Chicago D

Sara Paretsky has been called a "genius" by Lee Child and "one of the all time greats" by Karin Slaughter. Her detective, V.I. Warshawski, transformed the role of women in mystery and detective fiction from victim to hero. V.I. is tough, feminine, and vulnerable, but above she all loyal to her friends and clients. Paretsky and Warshawski share a love of singing, Golden Retrievers, and Italian reds. V.I. has escaped many near-death experiences, including drowning in Chicago's swamps (Blood Shot), falling down an elevator shaft (Burn Marks), and multiple attempts to shoot her down (Dead Land). Paretsky would have retired to the Umbrian Hills after one such event, but V.I. keeps coming back for more.

Paretsky was born in Iowa, but her family moved to Kansas when she was very young after her father accepted a faculty position at the University of Kansas. Following the receipt of her BA (political science), Paretsky did community service work in Chicago in 1966 and moved there in 1968. She obtained her MA and PhD (history) from the University of Chicago and an MBA from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. She was married to Courtenay Wright, a professor at the University of Chicago, from 1976 until his death in 2018. They had three children.

Paretsky's passion for social justice is reflected in her novels but also in her support for reproductive health and the welfare of women and children. She founded Sisters in Crime, an international organization that advocates for women in the mystery/thriller field. She is one of four living writers to earn both the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers and Grand Master from the Mystery Writers of America.

Presenting on Saturday, March 30th at 2:00 PM in Chicago D.

Rhonda V. Wilcox, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of Gordon State College (Georgia). She has been writing about good television since the last century. She is a former editor of Studies in Popular Culture, a founding editor of Critical Studies in Television, and the co-founder and co-editor of Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy+, now in its 23rd year. She is the author of Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2005); she is the co-editor, with David Lavery, of Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2002); with Tanya R. Cochran, of Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier (2008); with Sue Turnbull, of Investigating Veronica Mars: Essays on the Teen Detective Series (2011); and with Tanya R. Cochran, David Lavery, and Cynthea Masson, of Reading Joss Whedon (2014). Her most recent monograph, Grimm’s Trailer Full of Secrets: Character and Gender in the Television Series, was published in 2022. With Heather M. Porter and Michael Starr, she is currently preparing a collection on the Apple TV+ series Severance. She has also contributed many essays to various anthologies and peer-reviewed journals in the field of popular culture.

She is a co-founder (with Tanya R. Cochran) and past president of the 501 (c) (3) educational non-profit The Association for the Study of Buffy+ (formerly the Whedon Studies Association) as well as a past president and the current president of the Popular Culture Association in the South. With David Lavery, she started the Slayage conferences—which have met every two years, starting in 2004, and which will celebrate their twentieth anniversary with Buffy+ Studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, 18-21 July 2024.

She lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her husband, writer/musician/photographer Richard Gess, and their cat Marlowe. She has lectured around the world on the television series that she loves, helping to wake people up to the reality that television can be art.

Presenting on Thursday, March 28th at 1:15 PM in Chicago D.