Research

I am an interdisciplinary scholar who studies the metaculture of US popular culture. This includes how the text was formed as well as how the text is metaculture in US society. Because I am an interdisciplinary scholar I draw on a number of fields, including sociology and communication, in my research. While I examine US popular culture, most of my work focuses on comic books and musical theater. It’s important to explore US popular culture using the theory of metaculture because popular culture connects with its audiences and informs its audiences–whether what the audience takes from it is what the author intended or not–and what those audiences then do with their interpretation, including within fandoms, is important to understand.

Metaculture and the Access It Creates: A Hamilton Case Study

In 2015, Hamilton: An American Musical debuted Off-Broadway and changed musical theater forever. Hamilton is a uniquely American piece of culture that is transcending boundaries across the world. Lin-Manuel Miranda has found success at the intersection of hip-hop and theater culture that appeals to and welcomes audiences from both worlds without compromising either form.

My dissertation is a metacultural analysis of Hamilton, musical theater, and hip-hop. To understand the impact that Miranda and his co-creators have had in bringing hip-hop to the theater world and theater audiences in a way that appeals to them, including myself, we have to understand musical theater and hip-hop. In understanding musical theater and hip-hop’s metacultural elements, it is easier to see how the two were brought together so successfully with Hamilton. When I first heard about Hamilton, I figured I wouldn’t like it because it’s based in hip-hop. Now I’ve seen it multiple times and written a dissertation on it. This dissertation works to find some answers as to how this happened, not just for me, but for thousands of others, disrupting what many think what musical theater is and showing what musical theater can be, and should be.

Reframing Normal: The Inclusion of Deaf Culture in the X-Men Comic Books

During the over fifty-year history of The X-Men comic books and the numerous stories told within the various series, the mutants have been intentionally written as metaphors for how ethnic, racial, sexual, religious, and cultural minorities are treated in the United States. During that same time, the writers also unintentionally mirror deaf individuals and Deaf Culture in their portrayal of mutants and X-Men. Considering the vast number of stories in existence, I focus on the early works of Stan Lee, Grant Morrison’s time as writer of New X-Men, Joss Whedon’s time as writer of Astonishing X-Men, and Matt Fraction’s time as writer of Uncanny X-Men. In this thesis, I perform a close reading of these four writers’ works and compare them to the history of the deaf and Deaf in America, specifically their creation of a community and culture, use of schools and geography to create space for themselves, and the medical interventions that the rest of the world imposes upon them.

This is the thesis I wrote for my Master of Arts in Popular Culture. I am planning to revisit this and expand it into a book. If you have any thoughts or comments about this, please contact me with them.

‘What do you think about…?’: The metaculture of fandom

Metaculture is a theory first posited by Greg Urban in 2001. Metaculture is culture about culture, according to Urban. Fandom is a community of individuals who share a love for a text or person and discuss that text or person. Many fandoms create their own subcultures surrounding the object of their fannish activities. In those discussions and activities, metaculture is created and becomes a central aspect of what makes a fandom. While all fandoms use and create metaculture similarly, the object of their fandom has a unique relationship with metaculture that is influential in the creation of and a part of that fandom. This article describes the relationship between fandom and metaculture generally as well as in the context of Hamilton: An American Musical, Glamberts, and Ratatouille: The Tik-Tok Musical by drawing upon Urban, Henry Jenkins and Katherine Meizel, among others, to discuss how reality television, musical theatre and social media all interact with metaculture differently, influencing the creation and continuing existence of fandoms.

Published in Journal of Fandom Studies Vol. 10, Nos. 2 & 3, pp. 97-110, in 2022.

From B-Boys to Broadway: Activism and Directed Change in Hip-Hop

In this article, I examine how the dominant paradigm of development led to the Bronx being in a state of ruin, the development of hip-hop culture as a self-empowerment tool, and how that tool is used to direct change in blighted urban areas around the US through rap at all levels—from street corners to the Broadway stage. I use a combination of theories from development communication, ethnomusicology and popular culture to perform my analysis and conclude that hip-hop culture empowers individuals and communities to make change in their neighbourhoods. I also conclude that Lin-Manuel Miranda, coming from that culture, has gone on to bring this empowerment and directed change to Broadway to make fundamental changes there that have an impact that reach far from the hallowed halls of the Great White Way.

Published in Asia Pacific Media Educator Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 225-236, in 2019.