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Timothy Sweet

Atia Sattar

Seth Morton

Charles M. Tung

Robin Blyn

Theodore Bale

Joseph Campana

Aaron Jaffe

Grant Farred

Beth A. McCoy

Dennis Allen

“By playing with notions of collecting and cataloging, this anthology offers a range of investigations into detritus and forgotten ephemera.”—Colin Dickey, coeditor of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology
 
 The modern age is no stranger to the cabinet of curiosities, the freak show, or a drawer full of odds and ends. These collections of oddities engagingly work against the rationality and order of the conventional archive found in a university, a corporation, or a governmental holding. In form, methodology, and content, The Year’s Work in the Oddball Archive offers a counterargument to a more reasoned form of storing and recording the avant-garde (or the post-avant-garde), the perverse, the off, the bent, the absurd, the quirky, the weird, and the queer. To do so, it positions itself within the history of mirabilia launched by curiosity cabinets starting in the mid-fifteenth century and continuing to the present day. These archives (or are they counter-archives?) are located in unexpected places—the doorways of Katrina homes, the cavity of a cow, the remnants of extinct animals, an Internet site—and they offer up “alternate modes of knowing” to the traditional archive.

 “An unruly―and much-needed―model for how to do the archive differently.”—Scott Herring, author of The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture

 “It was a pleasure to read through this collection, and I suspect some of the essays, if not the entire book, will find itself on the syllabus for my Archive and Ephemera graduate course.”—Museum Anthropology Review

 “A finely wrought collection of curiosities . . . A vital intervention into how we talk about the stuff that surrounds us.”—Colin Dickey, coeditor of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology

Indiana University Press

The Year's Work: Studies in Fan Culture and Cultural Theory

The Year's Work in the Oddball Archive

Stephen Shapiro

John Gibson

Jack Raglin

Erik Bohman

Andrea Ruthven

Dan Hassler-Forest

Tatjana Soldat-Jaffe

Jonathan P. Eburne

Stephen Schneider

Stephen Watt

“Playful and (un)deadly serious . . . chew[s] through a near-exhaustive array of films, television, literature, culture, music and even cocktails.”—Times Literary Supplement
 
 They have stalked the horizons of our culture, wreaked havoc on moribund concepts of dead and not dead, threatened our sense of identity, and endangered our personal safety. Now zombies have emerged from the lurking shadows of society’s fringes to wander the sacred halls of the academy, feasting on tender minds and hurling rot across our intellectual landscape. It is time to unite in common cause, to shore up defenses, firm up critical and analytical resources, and fortify crumbling lines of inquiry. Responding to this call, Brain Workers from the Zombie Research Center poke and prod the rotting corpus of zombie culture trying to make sense of cult classics and the unstoppable growth of new and even more disturbing work. They exhume “zombie theory” and decaying historical documents from America, Europe, and the Caribbean in order to unearth the zombie world and arm readers with the brain tools necessary for everyday survival. Readers will see that zombie culture today “lives” in shapes as mutable as a zombie horde—and is often just as violent.
 
 “An intelligent and highly engaging collection that will appeal to legions of zombie fans, to students in the humanities, and to scholars working in fields that have already been affected by or are now preparing for the zombie apocalypse. It blends entertaining, illuminating, and accessible readings of zombies and zombie culture with unique interventions made from authoritative positions of expertise.”—Julian Murphet, author of Faulkner’s Media Romance

The Year's Work at the Zombie Research Center

The Year's Work: Studies in Fan Culture and Cultural Theory - The book series

The Year's Work: Studies in Fan Culture and Cultural Theory - The book series

The Year's Work: Studies in Fan Culture and Cultural Theory books in order

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