My colleague Angela Washington and I presented at this year’s Popular Culture Association (PCA) Conference in New Orleans. This presentation was more aligned to my first love– art librarianship and not to metal music, though I did attend a metal panel at this conference.
We presented our paper entitled, “The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gets Graphic: Building a Collection for the Library” under the Libraries, Archives, Museums, and Popular Research panel. We decided to present on how we started the graphic novel collection at the Met’s Nolan Library when I was working there back in 2010. It was right before we hired the current Public Services Librarian who is now conducting the teen and children’s programming. We were first up on our panel and got to meet and see wonderful presentations from the head bibliographer at Tulane and librarians from both San Diego State University and Florida International University. Overall, our presentation went very well and Angela did a great job at explaining the Watson and Nolan’s collection policy and its unique nuances involved with selecting, purchasing, processing and programming at the libraries.
Below was our panel line-up:
| The Metropolitan Museum of Art Gets Graphic: Building a Collection for the Library | The libraries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art are home to over 900,000 books and periodicals… | Angela Washington
Joan Jocson-Singh |
The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Paper |
| Poodle with a mohawk: Collecting cat and dog comics in an academic rare books department | In New Orleans, with its wealth of distinctive popular culture associations, it may not surprise… | Joshua Lupkin | Tulane University, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library | Paper |
| NSFW: Sexually Explicit Comics in Academic Libraries | Sexually explicit topics have been safely explored in the academic bubble for decades. However,… | Anna Culbertson | San Diego State University | Paper |
| Doujinshi and Libraries | Doujinshi are Japanese publications, usually created by amateurs and fans, though occasionally… | George Pearson | Florida International University | Paper |
Of course, I was most excited to attend the Music (metal) panel because of the papers presented (see below). A highlight for me was hearing Victoria Willis’s presentation on The Dialetic of T(werk): Hegel, Marx, and Womanist Agency in Mastodon’s “The Motherload” Video, because of her theoretical framework and it’s relation to feminism.
| Title | Body | Presenter | Affiliation | Presentation type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sunn O))) – A Camp Dimension? | In a video posted to YouTube, the drone metal band Sunn O))) can be seen performing an… | Albert Diaz | UCLA | Paper |
| “Rime of a Metal Mariner” | “Rime of a Metal Mariner” looks at Iron Maiden’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as an adaptation… | Justin J. Roberts | University of Kentucky | Paper |
| The Dialetic of T(werk): Hegel, Marx, and Womanist Agency in Mastodon’s “The Motherload” Video | In this paper, I examine the role of twerking in Mastodon’s recent video for “The Motherload.”… | Victoria Willis | Georgia State University | Paper |
| Hype, Visual Personae, and “Real” Music: The Example of Lana del Rey | Before Lana del Rey’s first album, ‘Born to Die,’ hit the stores, she was an internet sensation… | Mark Allister | St. Olaf College | Paper |
And the panel on Music (Gender) was too great to pass up:
| Title | Body | Presenter | Affiliation | Presentation type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bring It On Home: Gender and Sexuality in Led Zeppelin | Sasha T. Strelitz: “Bring It On Home: Gender and Sexuality in Led Zeppelin”
Many… |
Sasha Strelitz | University of Central Florida | Paper |
| “Bootylicious” with “Love on Top”: Female Empowerment and Performing Sexual Agency at the 2013 Super Bowl Halftime Show | In the middle of an exclusively masculine contest of muscle and strategy between the Baltimore… | Claire Anderson | University of Washington | Paper |
| “Papa, you ain’t got no mama now”: Analyzing Female Agency in Race Record Ads | When it comes to analyzing and understanding blues music, many researchers have turned to the… | Catherine Gooch | University of Kentucky | Paper |
| “What a Great Song…Except for the Lyrics!: Examining Rape Culture in Popular Music” |
In this paper, I explore the cultural and social landscape that popularizes music that… |
Melinda Mills | Castleton State College | Paper |
I’ve been telling folks for years that the Popular Culture Association is the most interesting academic conferences I’ve been to. Because it deals with popular culture, it really spans disciplines and is one of the more affordable conferences to attend if you’re not a member. You can present as an independent scholar which is also nice. I had a great time meeting other academics and really enjoyed learning about the varied research that’s going on all of the states.
Next year’s conference will be in Seattle – so I’m really looking forward to that.
ontheshelves 