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Thirty some years ago Ray Browne and several of his colleagues provided a forum for the academic study of popular culture by
forming first the Journal of Popular Culture and later the Popular Culture Association and the Center for the Study of Popular
Culture at Bowling Green State University. Twenty some years ago Thomas Inge thought the field of popular culture studies well
enough established to put together the first edition of his Handbook of Popular Culture. In the years since, scholars and educators
from many disciplines have published enough books, gathered enough conferences, and gained enough institutional clout to make
popular culture studies one of the richest fields of academic study at the close of the twentieth century. Thirty, twenty, in some places
even ten years ago, to study popular culture was to be something of a pariah; today, the study of popular culture is accepted and even
respected in departments of history, literature, communications, sociology, film studies, etc. throughout the United States and
throughout the world, and not only in universities, but in increasing numbers of high schools. Thomas Inge wrote in the introduction
to the second edition of his Handbook: “The serious and systematic study of popular culture may be the most significant and
potentially useful of the trends in academic research and teaching in the last half of this century in the United States.”2 It is to this
thriving field of study that we hope to contribute with the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture. |