BU Research Blog

The Marginalised Mainstream: Literature, Culture and Popularity is an annual event held at the Institute of English Studies in Senate House, University of London, co-organised by Sam Goodman (BU), Emma Grundy-Haigh and Brittain Bright (Goldsmiths). The aim of the initiative is to focus on those areas of popular culture that are critically and academically marginalised, or once popular authors or works that have since fallen into obscurity.

This year’s event took place on the 28^th-29^th November and featured BU’s Bronwen Thomas (Media School) and Naomi Braithwaite (Nottingham Trent) as its keynote speakers, delivering talks on online fan culture and the social performativity of shoes respectively. The theme of this year’s conference was Disguise, which led to a particularly varied and creative set of submissions, covering topics as diverse as showgirls and burlesque, spy fiction, Ice Road Truckers, confessional poetry, Game of Thrones, Indonesian superheroes, and Raffles the Gentleman Thief. There were also a selection of plenary panels featuring Len Platt (Goldsmiths) on musical theatre of the 1920s, Mariadele Boccardi (UWE) on neo-Victorian novels and science, and Andrew Harvey (Birkbeck) on sport and literature.

Marginalised Mainstream is supported by the Narrative Research Group within the Centre for Journalism and Communication at BU, and regularly attracts speakers and attendees from across the globe; this year’s event featured delegates from North America, India, Australia, China, and Russia, as well as from the UK and Europe. There is an emphasis on attracting early career and PGR delegates as well as established academics, and the delegates reflected a wide spectrum of career stages.

Details of the next event (scheduled for September 2015) will soon be released on the website: www.marginalisedmainstream.com. The theme of next year’s conference will be ‘Play & Performance’, and we welcome any informal enquiries at marginalisedmainstream@gmail.com.