@emcoccia
Postdoctoral Fellow for Innovation in the Liberal Arts at Carleton College * PhD in English & WGS from UMich * teaching and researching 19th C. American working-class reading cultures, media and fan studies, and queer and trans histories
Psst! Hey you!
The FSNNA Organizing Committee is recruiting new volunteers to bring fresh perspectives & ideas to the committee, and we'd love it if you applied!
Applications are open till Jan 31, 2026. Don't miss out!
summary of panel, which won't all fit in alt text: Over the past decade, there has been increased scholarly attention to how audiences, and particularly fans, have been incorporated into media industry practices. This has predominantly centered on the fans and practices that are most often industrially and socially sanctioned--heterosexual, cisgender white men and their habits of merchandise collection and canon-formation. This panel challenges this hegemonic focus by interrogating the dynamics between media industries and fans of femslash (typically woman/woman) relationships, whose affective and creative engagements disrupt conventional paradigms of fandom. First, this is a question about how queer fan content becomes formal industry content. Second, the panel examines how industry actively engages queer fans, or even seeks them out. Third, the panel considers how, departing from the history of antagonistic relationships with industry, some queer fans seek out industry validation of their interpretations of source texts. Fourth, the papers take up the question of whether and how fan-industry relationships shed light on how queerness itself is normalized in culture. Through four interdisciplinary case studies, we examine how queer fans navigate, subvert, and reconfigure industrial forces and opportunities to claim visibility and agency, seeking to broaden how we make sense of the relationships fans have with industry through the particular case of fans of lesbian content.
at #scms26, @emcoccia.bsky.social Julie Levin Russo, Jamie J. Zhao, and i will be presenting "From Margins to Markets: Lesbian-Oriented Fandom and the Media Industries"!
Ooh I just had a friend share this with me and am hoping to pitch a piece on a femslash work (just need to land on one...)
But as a lit studies/close-reading fan studies person, I'm delighted to see the CFP!
Also don't forget that our #FSNNA2025 Discord w/all the videos stays live till Nov 9!
So make sure to use that time to catch up on any sessions you missed & to keep those amazing conversations going
If anyone wants a little sneak preview of what’ll be the final chapter of my book, feel free to jump in and listen to this interview with one of my fan artist participants!
SIG members, remember we're having an election! Nominations for co-chair are due Friday, Sept. 19: forms.gle/w2g2C9cm4uq1...
In 2022, @emcoccia.bsky.social's "Femslash fan fiction’s expansive erotic imaginary" analyzes "the queer theoretical work fic writers do in interrogating dominant sexual scripts" in #TWC38. Read the full Article here:
Two of my wonderful undergraduate student research partners have been hard at work creating an audiobook companion for our community read of The Fastest Girl in New York to help make the project more accessible! Try giving Part 1 a listen--they did an incredible job! substack.com/@serialsensa...
BREAKING: A federal judge reversed National Institutes of Health's terminations of hundreds of critical research grants that were canceled because of their alleged connection to disfavored topics, including diversity, equity, inclusion, and gender identity.
This is a major win for public health.
Hey C19 and fandom/fan studies friends! I’m the one running this community reading project sharing a fun novella I talk about in the book project (which will, fingers crossed, be going out for review at the end of this summer!)
If you want to join me, check out the Substack linked below 🙂
For MTC, Emily Coccia reads the class and political evolution of Severance and why love stories are bad actually.
mid-theory.com/2025/06/02/l...
So many dimensions to this. But among them a failure to acknowledge the importance of highly skilled labor that is in fact a feature of the high costs of scholarly publishing. The collaborative work to produce scholarship requires expert/ paid editing, developmental and copyediting.
The dedication page of my dissertation which reads, “To the working-class women who have too often been left in the footnotes of history.”
Very honored to share that “Workingwomen and Pleasured Reading: 19th C. Sensation Fiction and the Formation of Queer Readers” received the Working-Class Studies Association’s Constance Coiner Award for the best dissertation! Excited to be working on turning this project into a book!
The deadline has now been extended to May 19th, so you should take this as a sign to apply! We’d love to have you
And do note this year we have both a poster and paper track for presenters, as well as an undergrad-specific cfp to showcase student work and help build mentorship networks!
Getting back on Bluesky/social media just in time for #scms2025 - echoing this enthusiastic invitation to come join us over at the Swissotel tomorrow late morning if you’ll be around!
I just wrote to all of my congressional representatives to plead them to support the NEH, for everyone, for public history, for scholarship, for teaching, for all of it. I used this widget: very easy, it has a template, and automatically looks up the emails of your representatives. p2a.co/DdtlGIT
Would love to, yes! I was on the short-lived Fangirl's Guide to the Internet podcast a couple times back in the day talking about the Dickinson and Supergirl fandoms, and I've missed doing the more public-facing, accessible work!
Would love to be added! I'm on the FSN OC and work on femslash fandom, affective ambivalence, and representations of queer desire and eroticism! Thanks for putting this list together
Georgetown Law told a pregnant student due amid exams that she has to take her final with everyone else, because accommodation would be “inequitable” to “non-birthing” peers.
They suggested she bring her newborn to campus as she does her exam.
“Motherhood is not for the faint of heart,” they said.
ACTION ALERT: Today is the LAST DAY to submit comments to the CDC urging them to recommend universal N95 masking in healthcare settings.
You can submit comments directly by email at HICPAC@CDC.gov or via their website form:
We did watch 2 eps of The Haunting of Bly Manor, which they loved! But those paragraph-long sentences were not for most of them despite my best efforts haha
On the last day of classes, I ask my students to reflect on their learning and jot down one piece of advice they'd give to future students in the class. My favorite from this fall was: "Stay away from Henry James!!" Sorry James, the kids have officially crowned Poe & Melville kings of the syllabus!
Since there seem to be a lot of new professors on Bluesky, I'll re-share this link to the AAUP's "Organize Every Campus" campaign. This is a critical time for faculty to organize in defense of our students, ourselves and co-workers, and the institutions we believe in. Join us!
I changed my settings to prompt me to do it every time!
October 28, an amazing group of Palestinians. Diana Buttu, Noura Erekat, Ahmed Eldin, Tareq Baconi, Isabella Hamad.
An independent assessment of UNCG's finances revealed that there is no budget crisis that justifies the proposed cuts, and indeed that the real issue is the cost of admin salaries and a significant deficit in the athletic department.
ncnewsline.com/2023/10/16/m...
The photo shows two brown brindle pit bull mix puppies cuddled together in a nest of blankets. One puppy is sleeping with his head on a plush blue toy, while the other is curled into her brother.
I don't mean to brag, but giving up a few research/dissertation hours a week to volunteer at the humane society was definitely the best choice I made in grad school