This guide is intended to point you toward foundational scholarship and recent research about fandoms including fan fiction, fan art, and fan communities. Included within this guide are relevant databases, journals, and websites to help you find more sources and complete your research projects in Fan Studies. If you have any additional resources or information that is not part of this guide, feel free to contact me.
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Fan Studies is the academic field in which scholars explore fans, fan communities, fan cultures, fan activities.
Fans can be conceptualized as individuals who identify and passionately interact with popular media or literature, engaging with the source in a number of ways. Fans can engage with a text by participating in the fan community for that specific media or do "fan labor," which are a number of creation activities including fanart and fanfiction.
This scholarly field emerged in the early 1990s, providing a theoretical framework to conceptualize fan activities, and sought to elevate the position of the fan to celebrate fans' mastery of texts and critical engagement outside of traditional academic venues. For this reason, Fan Studies is an interdisciplinary field that draws from the humanities, social sciences, psychology, media studies, audience studies, and cultural studies. Fandom can be inspected and interpreted with various approaches, which is why having a multi-perspective conception of fandom is essential for scholarly research.
