All month we’ve been unveiling the special, plenary roundtables for our 2024 conference. Our fourth and final plenary session will be True Crime and Fan Studies, featuring Bethan Jones, Megan Hoffman, and Naomi Barnes and curated by none other than Monster of Fan Studies Judith Fathallah!
Fandom and fannish engagement around true crime media is currently understudied. Part of this neglect may stem from discomfort with the topic and attempts to avoid the stigma associated with the pathologized fandom of criminals, notably serial killers, into which this engagement can shade. But fan studies as a field should not overlook forms of fandom that discomfort and challenge us as researchers and as consumers of popular media. The current resurgence of the true crime in forms spanning amateur podcasts to high-budget Netflix specials indicates that the time is right for us to consider such questions as:
- What forms of fannish engagement are taking place around true crime?
- What makes this engagement fannish?
- What are the implications of such phenomena for fan studies?
- What are the implications for media industries?
The panel is convened by Dr. Judith Fathallah, author of Killer Fandom: Fan Studies and the Celebrity Serial Killer (mediastudies.press 2023). Judith has also published on serial killer fanfiction, gatekeeping in true crime communities, and the curation/collection of artefacts associated with true crime, known as murderabilia. The panel features Dr. Bethan Jones, co-editor of Participatory Culture Wars: Controversy, Conflict and Complicity in Fandom (University of Iowa Press, 2025) and author of work on true crime, forensic fandom and “dark” fandom; Dr. Megan Hoffman, co-editor of the forthcoming collection #TrueCrime: Digital Culture, Ethics and True Crime Audiences and author of Gender and Representation in British “Golden Age” Crime Fiction (Palgrave, 2016), among other work on post-#MeToo true crime, true crime hybrid YouTube videos and true crime activism on TikTok; and Naomie Barnes, whose work has explored the tensions involved in identifying as a “fan” of true crime content, such as in “Killer Folklore: Identity Issues in the True Crime Community” (Ethnologies 41, no 1: 153–72).
Dr. Fathallah’s true crime roundtable will be held on Sunday, Oct. 20.
We’ll be releasing the full conference program soon!