Matt Hills is a fan studies and media scholar of really wide breadth, expertise, and versatility, author of the classic fan studies text Fan Cultures (2002) as well as a number of subsequent monographs: How To Do Things With Cultural Theory (2005),The Pleasures of Horror (2005), Triumph of a time lord (2010), Blade Runner (2011) Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event (2015) – he’s also one of the editors of Transatlantic Television Drama (2019), the Doctor Who reader Adventures Across Space and Time (2023), and Theatre Fandom (2025) as well as a prolific writer of essays and book chapters on a broad swath of fandoms, practices, and cult classics: Star Wars, Veronica Mars, Torchwood, Sherlock, Buffy, Lord of the Rings, and more.
When I asked Matt to give me a go-to piece of criticism, he agonized, wanting different quotes for different areas of his scholarly repertoire. Could he do more than one? Sure he could do more than one! – far be it for me to contain the wide-ranging mind of Matt Hills. 😀
So we’ll get three quotes from Matt, starting today with his quote for fan studies. –FC
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Any go-to citation would have changed over the years for me, and could also have been linked to a specific book project or set of journal articles/chapters that I was working on. If I think about the main areas that I publish in — fan studies and work on Doctor Who (not always about Who fans, but often) — then I’d select the following…
An Indicative Quotation for Fan Studies:
Participation in geek culture, like many leisure activities, presupposes access to at least some material or cultural commodities. For example if you want to garden, you need seeds and tools; if you want to play music, you need instruments and perhaps sheet music; if you want to go bird-watching, you need a pair of binoculars (Keat 2000, 144). Russell Keat calls these objects “equipment-goods.” They are commodities whose consumption enables the pursuit of some practice, rather than being a pleasurable end in itself. Cultural goods can also be considered equipment-goods for at least some of their consumers: comic book fans need comics and gamers need games, just like birdwatchers need their binoculars. In our society, the production and distribution of these goods are principally orchestrated through markets. Markets not only supply practitioners with needed equipment-goods but also generate a livelihood for the people who make and distribute them – after all, even the most committed individuals can only volunteer so much of their time and personal financial resources. Yet the interests of producers, intermediaries, and consumers do not always match. (Woo 2018: 132–133)
I’ve gone back a lot very recently to Getting A Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture (2018) by Benjamin Woo. It’s such a rich empirical study, and so well theorised (it reminds me of when I first read Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers in that regard). I find it useful for the extent to which it acknowledges how geek culture is built out of commodities (collectables and assorted merch) and relationships to commercial venues/spaces, while also recognising the community but also the sociality of fandom. I think as a study it will end up reaching far beyond the contexts of its initial fieldwork and analysis.
— Matt Hills (Honorary Professor at the University of Bristol, and previously Professor of Fandom Studies at Huddersfield University).