[ADMIN] Introduction Post

Hello! My name is Alex Jenkins, and I will be replacing Cryptoxin as Dana’s regular co-blogger here at the Symposium Blog. I’m very excited about posting here, and I hope to continue Cryptoxin’s excellent work creating a bridge between academic work on fandom on the one side, and fannish meta on the other. In my home fandoms (think Whedonverse), these intersect pretty much constantly, but I am just as constantly (and pleasantly!) surprised how much the two worlds have to offer one another, and how much their intersection can deepen our engagements with source texts, as well as with one another.

I’m a dissertating graduate student at Ohio State, where I teach writing classes, as well as classes on film and popular culture, when they let me. I blog occasionally about my dissertation research and teaching here at Fictional Fans. Once you get the joke in my title, you get my dissertation project: It’s not fan fiction, it’s fictional representations of fans. I was drawn to this topic because I felt that fiction offered a cool, as yet-untapped, resource for exploring the limits of FIAWOL — where could we better explore the extent to which a whole world can be organized around fannish engagement, but in storyworlds organized around fan-identified protagonists?

But don’t worry, that’s not what I’ll be writing about here. Here, I’ll be writing about topics that have been generating good conversations in fandom as well as in academic spaces, and working to locate productive tensions that seem to merit closer observation. It’s vague, I know. I look forward to finding my niche here, and welcoming your feedback.

Up next — my first “real” post, on The Social Network and/as RPF!