Feature: MSU is the Global Leader in Popular Culture Studies

            Just as it took folklore years to be accepted by academia, the field of popular culture studies is now establishing itself—with MSU leading the way.

            In 2002, Spiderman generated more than $400 million at the box office and became the biggest blockbuster hit that summer. 

            Readers of this magazine know that director Sam Raimi, now one of Hollywood’s top filmmakers, learned his craft while a student at Michigan State—as did many other successful “Spartans In Hollywood.”  But what you might not know is that the film’s massive success underscores the rise of a new field of academic inquiry, one spearheaded largely by MSU.

            Until recently, Spiderman, created by writer Stan Lee for Marvel comic books, was not considered something worthy of study in academic circles.  Neither were Superman, Batman, or for that matter, MacDonald french fries, Madonna, tattoos, or reality shows like American Idol, Survivor and The Bachelor, featuring MSU alumnus Bob Guiney, ’93 (see p. 14, Fall 2003).  All of these items form part of our “popular culture,” a concept once regarded with the same disdain at universities as jazz was disparaged at MSU’s School of Music.  But in recent years, just as “jazz studies” has emerged as an exciting new music major at MSU (see pp. 26-29, Fall 2003), the study of popular culture has emerged as a new, exciting, vibrant and most importantly, respected field of study.  This emergence was due largely to MSU’s leadership.

            Indeed, MSU today is recognized as much for popular culture studies as for nuclear physics research, teacher education, primary care medicine, and various business disciplines, just to mention a few areas of excellence.  Ask anyone in popular culture studies around the globe and chances are that they will cite MSU as the international leader in the field.

            The study of popular culture has become important because, like other fields that have established themselves in academia, popular culture is important and meaningful to people.  Understanding it is critical to understanding how culture, society and the individual interact, which is fundamental to the concept of a liberal arts education.  As Anne Allison, department chair and associate professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University, explains, “More and more scholars are realizing that popular culture is every bit as important as Shakespeare or opera—it’s whatever gives life value and meaning and piques imagination.”

            The study of popular culture at the university level began in the late 1960s under the leadership of two inventive and far-sighted professors, Ray Browne at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and Russel B. Nye at Michigan State University.  Professor Browne founded the first department of popular culture at Bowling Green, as well as the Popular Culture Association, a professional group representing several thousand academics and scholars from around the world. He also created the Journal Of Popular Culture and the Popular Press at Bowling Green, to support and publish the growing scholarship in the field.

            While Ray Browne was establishing the foundations of popular culture studies at Bowling Green, Russel B. Nye was publishing ground-breaking research about popular culture.  Nye’s book, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (1970) became a defining book in the field.  Nye was a Pulitzer Prize winning author who, during his long and illustrious career at Michigan State College sought to demonstrate the academic value and importance of studying popular culture. In addition to being one of the two major founding scholars in the field, Nye was the first president of the national Popular Culture Association and a major force in the development of a popular culture studies curriculum in the English Dept. at MSU.

            A year ago, a faculty panel selected Nye as one of MSU’s 13 “Iconic Professors”—the most prominent of MSU’s many distinguished professors during its first sesquicentennial (see “MSU’s Iconic Professors,” Spring 2003, pp. 22-25—Editor).  Their portraits are painted as murals in the MSU Union’s Heritage Café.  A native of Wisconsin, Nye began teaching at MSC in 1941 and remained a faculty member until his retirement in 1979.  He donated his substantial collection of popular culture to the MSU Library, thus establishing one of the top research sites in the nation.

            Nye’s notable accomplishments put MSU on the map.  Historically, regarding literary and cultural criticism, American scholars have turned to the Russian and French theorists, such as with the French and Russian structuralists and post-scructuralists, or to the British and their slavish devotion to Marxist criticism. Otherwise, American academics have turned to the Ivy League and East Coast schools for direction in the humanities. What Nye accomplished was the establishment of a new and compelling intellectual tradition in the Midwest: the idea that the culture of everyday domestic and international life should be examined and critiqued. Thus, popular culture studies, in conjunction with American Studies (founded a century earlier by Wisconsin professor Frederick Jackson Turner) is the Midwest’s, and specifically Michigan State University’s, contribution to the humanities.

             Nye’s enduring legacy at MSU has resulted in Spartan leadership in the field of popular culture studies. In several notable areas of popular culture studies, MSU leads not only the Big Ten, but also all American colleges and universities. The Special Collections housed at the MSU Library is one of the two finest in the world regarding its popular culture holdings. Originally based, in part, on the personal library donated by Nye, under the leadership of its head, Peter Berg, and its librarians such as Randall Scott, it is a resource second to none. In particular, the Special Collections’ holdings in popular fiction and radical literature are the finest to be found, and Randall Scott’s building of its superlative comic book collection, has helped to make MSU’s Special Collection one of the most admired in the country.  Recently when Duke University acquired a prized collection of 55,000 comic books, Duke magazine (September-October 2003) reported the acquisition but acknowledged that it was “not as large as Michigan State’s,” which is roughly three times larger.

            MSU is also a national and international leader in the development of a university-level popular culture studies curriculum. In the English Dept., for example, Michigan State offers some of the finest film studies courses outside of Hollywood and the West Coast.  Indeed, two recent features in this magazine covered the phenomenal success of “Spartans In Hollywood,” MSU graduates who have enjoyed major success in the film industry (see cover story, Spring 1999, and pp. 22-26, Summer 2000).  The late Jim Cash was a very popular professor who commanded his students’ respect by his own success as a screenwriter;  in partnership with his former student, Jack Epps, Jr., the duo wrote the scripts for such Hollywood hits as Top Gun, Legal Eagles, The Secret Of My Success, Anaconda, Dick Tracy, and many other films.

            The English Dept. also features major classes in the study of popular fiction and popular culture theory. In the expanding undergraduate American Studies program, a new course has just been developed, AMS-210, entitled “American Popular Culture,” which has begun in Fall 2003 to an overflowing enrollment. And, more undergraduate American Studies courses featuring popular culture studies are currently in the curricular development and review process.

            MSU features the largest faculty in the country researching and teaching in popular culture.  The university typically sends more faculty to the annual meetings of the national Popular Culture Association than does any other academic institution in the world, and MSU has had more elected officers serve in this organization. The Popular Culture Association is the single largest international organization of popular culture academics. Its membership includes several thousand scholars from America and around the world. Beginning with Nye’s election as the first President of the Popular Culture Association, MSU has contributed two additional Presidents of the PCA over the years: myself and Douglas Noverr.

            But perhaps the most important recent development in MSU’s leadership in the field of popular culture studies has been the recent acquisition of The Journal Of Popular Culture, and my appointment as its new editor.  Founded in the late-1960s by Ray Browne at Bowling Green State University, upon Browne’s retirement as its editor and publisher, the journal was purchased by Blackwell Publishing, one of the world’s largest publishers of scholarly journals.  With the critical and visionary assistance of MSU’s Provost, Lou Anna Simon, the dean of the College of Arts & Letters, Wendy Wilkins, and the chairperson of the Dept. of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, Douglas Noverr, Michigan State was able to bring the editorial office of this prestigious journal to East Lansing.

            MSU supported the establishment of this new editorial office of The Journal Of Popular Culture by providing office space in Bessey Hall for the journal’s management, as well as several part-time employee positions to assist in the editorial operations of the journal, including a Managing Editor position, and several Editorial Assistant positions. These part time positions are typically offered to American Studies Ph.D. students as an opportunity to learn about the operation and management of a major scholarly journal. Michigan State is also provided supplies and services support.

            Recently The Journal Of Popular Culture was significantly redesigned to feature a new cover, a new logo, and a new typeface style.  A concerted effort has been made to increase dramatically the JPC’s international presence. The journal’s previous editorial advisement board was substantially revised and expanded, and the new structure, entitled the Editorial Advisory Board, which is responsible for all reviews of submitted articles, has been expanded to include a sizable number of international scholars of popular culture studies from around the world.  In addition to there being the top U.S. scholars serving on the JPC’s Editorial Advisory Board, approximately one third of the Board’s membership features the best international scholars of popular culture, from countries including Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Mexico, Japan, Turkey, Norway, Australia, Northern Ireland, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic.

            In addition, the journal’s publisher, Blackwell, has aggressively expanded distribution of The Journal Of Popular Culture in new and exciting international markets. For example, the JPC has recently been added to a major Russian publishing consortium, which will place the journal in areas that no other journal of its type has ever been distributed before.

            With its distinguished heritage in popular culture studies, as represented in the award-winning research of the field’s co-founder, Russel B. Nye, as well as with its national leadership in creating a university-level curriculum in popular culture courses, and its ongoing support of the single largest group of university faculty devoted to the study of popular cultured, these assets, as well as the recent acquisition ofThe Journal Of Popular Culture, has made Michigan State University the undisputed leader in this vibrant area of new and exciting scholarship. 

Gary Hoppenstand is associate chairperson and professor in the Dept. of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at MSU.  He has published ten books and more than 50 scholarly articles on topics ranging from popular culture to film studies, and has written the introductions to several Penguin Classics editions, including Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau, A.E.W. Mason’s The Four Feathers, and Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood, as well as the introductions to the Signet Classic editions of Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow.  He is currently completing a book-length study entitledPage-Turners: A History of Popular Fiction for Oxford University Press, and is editing a new textbook entitled Science Fiction: A Reader for Longman. His work as an editor has been twice nominated for the World Fantasy Award, and his Popular Fiction: An Anthology won the Popular Culture Association’s “Best Book Award” in 1998. He is the current editor of The Journal Of Popular Culture, and series editor of an six-volume Encyclopedia of World Popular Culture to be published by Greenwood Press.