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Below find excerpts from three essays in A Fan Studies Primer: Method, Research, Ethics, edited by Paul Booth and Rebecca Williams (Iowa 2021). These essays are on subjects that, to my mind, are under-researched: fan art, Black cosplay, and quantitative approaches to fandom:

“Unfortunately, while fan studies scholarship boasts a growing stack of books, chapters, and journal articles on fan fiction, fan art remains comparatively understudied. The extant writings tend to focus on specific instances of fan art creation instead of considering fan art more broadly or theoretically. This seems like a strange oversight, as the explosion of fan art has occurred alongside that of fan fiction, taking advantage of many of the same social media spaces, technologies, and fan communities. Fan art is a social practice, a frequent means of transcultural communication, an engaged response to media, a visual text, and sometimes a physical object. By studying fan art, we can learn a great deal about the fan communities who produce and share it. 

An important characteristic of fan art as a genre is that it is generally designed to be read, that is, for a viewer to recognize and understand what it is meant to represent and reference. Iconography is a key tool for understanding how much of this readability functions. Art historian Erwin Panofsky defined iconography as that branch of the history of art which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form. This chapter considers the role of iconography in making fan art readable, as well as looking at how this iconography can develop and what these iconographic choices can tell us about fans and fandoms.”  

–EJ Nielsen, “The Iconography of Fan Art”

~ ~ ~

“In this chapter, I shed light on the activities of Black cosplayers usually rendered invisible because of their racialized performance of cosplay. The performance and skill of Black fans tend to go unheard, so I focus on the Black cosplayer movement, where Black cosplayers attempt to be seen by the general public and each other. The focus on Black cosplay provides a deeper understanding of identity performance in fandom and cultural studies more broadly. I begin by summarizing what cosplay is and the work done in the fandom studies field that can help us understand how Black fans interact with cosplay and the struggles they face. I conduct a critical discourse analysis of the tweets and images posted since 2015 under the hashtag #28DaysOfBlackCosplay. This movement shows how the online Black fan community uses cosplay to resist the hierarchical structure in fandoms and gain visibility.” 

–Alex Thomas, “The Dual Imagining: Afrofuturism. Queer Performance, and Black Cosplayers”

~ ~ ~

“Fan studies has always been robustly interdisciplinary. Its methodological and epistemological diversity should be celebrated and expanded. This chapter attempts to do both by presenting a case for the increased role of quantitative and computational tools and methods and for the kind of data-informed approaches to fandom and fanworks they make possible. Such approaches have struggled to find any real purchase in the field, which is somewhat puzzling given content industries’ increasing emphasis on the “datafication” of media audiences in general and fannish audiences in particular. Fan studies will need to engage with this trend and its ramifications, as well as with the algorithmic culture of which they are both cause and effect. The value of quantitative and computational tools and methods is hardly confined to this one area. On the contrary, when thoughtfully applied to data generated by and about fans, fandom, and fanworks, these tools and methods are very likely to make visible patterns, trends, relationships, networks, and (dis)continuities therein that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to discern.” 

–Josh Stenger, “The Datafication of Fandom: Or How I Stopped Watching the DC Arrowverse on The CW and Learned to Mine Fanwork Metadata”

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Special Pre-Tony Awards Post

OK, a little bit of a self-plug here, but there’s so much great work in Theatre Fandom: Engaged Audiences in the Twenty-first Century (2025), edited by Kirsty Sedgman, Matt Hills, and me.  Theatre Fandom is the first book to really cross audience and fan studies and think of theatre fans as fans in a fandom. It’s part of the University of Iowa’s Fandom and Culture Series, which includes books such as Bridget Kies and Megan Connor’s Fandom, the Next Generation (2022), Katherine Anderson Howell’s Disability and Fandom (2024) and Rukmini Pande’s Fandom, Now in Color (2020). In addition to more theoretical essays about what fandom and fannish behavior looks like in theatre as opposed to TV or film, there are also essays on particular theatrical fandoms from a broad array of scholars from the US and the UK. Ruth Foulis writes about how Harry Potter fandom was extended by Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and Louie Lang Norman writes about A Very Potter Musical. Sarah K. Whitfield has an essay on Hamilton fandom as a site of bisexual representation, and Emily Garside writes about being a Rent fan for decades. Laura MacDonald writes about East Asian fans who reproduce and cosplay their favorite Western musical theatre shows, and playwright Dominique Morisseau talks to Kirsty Sedgman about how black fans in particular are policed as theatrical audiences (sadly relevant this week with the Patti LuPone/ Audra McDonald/Kecia Lewis fued flaring up again.) (IYKYK.)

And that’s just some of what’s in the book.  All the scholars involved hope that this book will generate lots more scholarship on theatre and fandom.  Everyone knows that theatre kids (and theatre grownups!) are hugely fannish (this was absolutely why Glee was pitched to media fans), and yet there’s so little scholarly literature about fandom in theatre. What there is is mostly in Shakespeare studies: books like Shakespeare’s Fans: Adapting the Bard in the Age of Media Fandom (2020) by Johnathan Pope and The Shakespeare Multiverse  by Louise Geddes and Valerie M. Fazel.  Agata Luksa has written about Polish theatre fans in the 19th Century. Nemo Martin has written about the construction of race in online Les Mis fandom.  Trevor Boffone is writing about musical theatre fandom on TikTok.  But we need more, much much more!  

As we say in the book’s introduction:

Where, you might be wondering, is the chapter on Phans? What about the Hedheads (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), the Fansies (Newsies), the Fun Homies (Fun Home), the Maggots (Matilda), the Jekkies (Jekyll and Hyde), or the Ozians (Wicked)? Where is the fringe show cum hit BBC TV series cum celebrated theatre production Fleabag? Such absences may inspire future work, we hope, and we certainly call for it.

I mean, Sondheim is totally a fandom, right? (Sing out, Louise!)

–Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer

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