| Meet a PCA Board Member |
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November 2025
Annie Bierman is the Director of the Writing Center and Instructor of English at McKendree University in Illinois. She earned her Master’s in English Literature with a specialization in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research focuses on adaptations, gender, and power, and she teaches first-year writing, Coming of Age Literature, and American Dream Literature. 1.) How did you first become involved with the Popular Culture Association, and what inspired you to join the Board? I presented in the Undergraduate Sessions in 2010 when the conference was in St. Louis. One of my undergraduate professors encouraged me to present a paper I wrote for her class, and since St. Louis was only 40 minutes away, I gave it a shot. It was my first ever academic conference, and everyone was so kind and welcoming. The same undergraduate professor and our current PCA/ACA President Brenda Boudreau again encouraged me to run for the Board. 2.) Could you tell us a bit about your specific research interests within popular culture studies? Every paper I’ve written for PCA has had to do with film or television—especially adaptations or retellings of other works like fairy tales, novels, songs, short stories, etc. I’ve presented in Undergraduate Sessions, and British Popular Culture, but have been most recently presenting with Adaptations and Retellings where I’m an Area Co-Chair. I tend to look at gender in these works, and how gender changes with the changing mediums. 3.) What does the PCA community mean to you? It’s creativity, joy, and connection. I love that I can be on the elevator at a conference and make a new connection because of someone’s Legend of Zelda pin or because of their name/school. PCA’s interdisciplinary focus has allowed me to meet people outside of my discipline and outside of academia in a way that I cannot at other conferences. Sometimes choosing a topic to present on any given year is very hard because there are simply too many great, recent works to choose from, but it’s a fun challenge. 4.) Outside of your work and research, what's a favorite hobby or a fun fact about you that most people might not know? I really enjoy functional strength training. I started in 2020, and since then, I’m stronger and more fit, but I’m also more balanced. It’s so easy to get lost in work and family life, so dedicating at least 3 hours a week to lifting heavy things or challenging myself to a new modification is my version of self-care. 5.) What's one aspect of your academic or professional journey that you're particularly proud of? I’ve been studying popular culture since college, and now I’ve incorporated it into my courses. I’ve found that no matter how old I get (especially as my students stay the same age), popular culture is a way for use to connect. I ask my first year writing students to analyze memes, visual media, as well as TV shows and films, and because they’re able to talk about popular culture, they enjoy writing more, and as a result, they learn how to be better writers.
October 2025
Gary Burns is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University. He received his Ph.D. in Radio, Television, and Film from Northwestern University.
How did you first become involved with the Popular Culture Association, and what inspired you to join PCA? I became aware of PCA in 1976 when I was doing an internship in college teaching at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois, as part of my studies for an M.A. in communication (then called speech communication) at Northern Illinois University. My mentor at Harper had copies of the Journal of Popular Culture, which I had not seen before. That's how I found out about PCA. Five years later, as I was finishing my Ph.D. at Northwestern University, I received one of the flyers sent out from Bowling Green about the upcoming 1982 PCA/ACA conference. They were looking for somebody to be Area Chair for Music for ACA (the American Culture Association, an affililate of PCA). I volunteered and got the job, which I did until 2008. My first PCA/ACA conference was in Louisville in 1982. I immediately knew that these were my people.
Could you tell us a bit about your specific research interests within popular culture studies? My main interests are popular music, film, TV, and music video. As I've spent so much time with PCA over the years, I've also become interested in the organization itself and the historical development of popular culture studies. I'm currently Area Chair for the History of PCA. (I'm also the official Historian of PCA.) I've written articles on popular music and some CD liner notes and am Editor (with Tom Kitts and Martin Butler) of two music journals. One is Popular Music and Society, which was founded at Bowling Green in 1971 by the sociologist R. Serge Denisoff. He died in 1994, and I became Editor at that time. The journal grew so much that we added Tom as a second Editor in 2008 and Martin as a third Editor in 2024. Tom and I founded the journal Rock Music Studies in 2014 as a spinoff of Popular Music and Society. I coedited two books on TV with Bob Thompson, and I edited a book called A Companion to Popular Culture, published in 2016 by Wiley-Blackwell, which includes chapters by numerous PCA people.
What does the PCA community mean to you? PCA means the world to me. I've never felt so much at home in any other organization. Many of my lifetime friends are PCA people. Many of the good things that have happened to me in my career have been because of PCA. The founders of PCA respected popular culture and the people who produce, enjoy, and study it. Most of the rest of academe, even in my own field of communication, thought popular culture was unworthy of study because it was unimportant or bad. Not many people would say that now, but PCA was there at the beginning of the serious study of the culture of the people. PCA is democratic and pluralistic but rigorous. There's no other group like it.
Outside of your work and research, what's a favorite hobby or a fun fact about you that most people might not know? I write songs. Not much lately, but quite a few over the years. Another thing I've been doing recently is writing for an email newsletter that is a revived version of an underground publication that I worked on in high school. Then it was called American Revelation. The current version is Alive and Kicking. It's three of the original people, plus another one of our friends from high school. We distribute it as a PDF to classmates, relatives, and friends. It's mostly political. We are far left but also publish stuff by our conservative classmates.
What's one aspect of your academic or professional journey that you're particularly proud of? There was a time, from 1998 to 2001, when the Midwest PCA was defunct. For some reason, Ray Browne asked me to lead an effort to try to revive it, by golly we did, and it's still alive and well. Some of my NIU students at the time became involved and are still active in the organization, so I like to think I was instrumental in bringing some wonderful people together for the greater good of the students, NIU, PCA, and MPCA. I'd also like to say that I'm especially proud to be part of PCA at this time in the nation's history. PCA stands for democracy, academic freedom, diversity, and equality, in the face of all pressure to the contrary. It's an important voice in the battle for a humane culture. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
September 2025
Dr. Peter Cullen Bryan received his PhD in American Studies and Communication at the Pennsylvania State University in 2018. His areas of study include American Studies, Intercultural Communication, and 21st Century American culture, emphasizing comic art and fan communities. His research has appeared in the Journal of Fandom Studies, The Journal of American Culture, and Popular Culture Studies Journal, exploring the intersections of creative activism and fan identities in adaptational and transnational spaces. 1.) How did you first become involved with the Popular Culture Association, and what inspired you to join the Board? My first PCA was Boston in 2012 - I was in my first year of grad school, and attended along with about a dozen fellow students. My first presentation was attended only by two of grad school chums, falling during dinner, but the discussion with my fellow panelists was engaging and interesting, and I felt welcomed, even as a first-year Master's student. I have been back every year since, as well as joining the Board of MAPACA, and presenting at NEPCA and MPCA over the years. I ran for the Board in 2020 (before the world fell down) as a way to do something positive for the organization on a bit of a lark, having no comprehension of the seismic shifts that would follow in the world, the PCA, and my own life. 2.) Could you tell us a bit about your specific research interests within popular culture studies? My focus is on adaptational frameworks with and of comics - my first book explored Donald Duck Comics in translation into German (emphasizing the parallel work of Carl Barks, Erika Fuchs, and Don Rosa), my second (forthcoming) explores Red Sonja in the context of Robert E. Howard's stories and the key authors in her development as pulp-feminist icon (discussing creators ranging from Roy Thomas to Wendy Pini to Gail Simone). I have forthcoming articles and edited chapters on how Ducktales and Batman The Animated Series work with the legacy of superheroes, the ways in which Hawkeye portrays neurodivergence through "Pizza Is My Business," the reach of Ducktales NES "Moon Theme," and the faults and functions of Disney's three major foxe characters. I embody interdisciplinary in my work and research, developing approaches on gender and disability into my work, the sort of thing that might only find a permanent welcome at the Popular Culture Association. 3.) What does the PCA community mean to you? It means getting up at 7 AM to see a panel on popular culture portrayals of libraries, then taking in a panel on narratives of sea disasters. From there, head to a roundtable on publishing with the Journal of American Culture, before catching lunch with some new friends to talk about an article idea that grows into a fully-fledged edited collection on Disney Italia. There is time enough then to take in a raucous panel that includes a presentation on Clarabelle Cow: Disney's First Gay Icon, followed by a conversation about Disney's newest parks and properties. At some point, find time to grab dinner, then on to whatever Science Fiction Fantasy has chosen for their screening (always unexpected and strange!), and finally enjoying a round of something new at Game Studies board game night. Finally, it's time to head to bed, except someone waves you over when you wander by the bar, and you end up closing down the whole thing, and bouncing back in time for the next morning's 8 AM panels. There is more to do at the PCA than can ever be done, every single time. Besides, not everyone sends flowers to your mom's funeral, but the PCA did. . 4.) Outside of your work and research, what's a favorite hobby or a fun fact about you that most people might not know? As I'm not currently in an academic position, I run a small rural Post Office, of which I am effectively the only employee. In my youth, my family raised Leader Dogs for the Blind, though we wound up keeping the last dog after he was rejected due to medical issues. Famed B-movie actor Bruce Campbell signed my high school yearbook. 5.) What's one aspect of your academic or professional journey that you're particularly proud of? I am the first person in my family to attend college - I am the grandson of a park ranger, a plumber, a homemaker, and a supervisor; the son of a phone engineer and one of the first female telephone installers and union stewards. I am here because everyone before me could not be, who might have been if they had the same opportunities. That I've done all I have while being on the autism spectrum, trapped in a world I did not create, just further girds my desire to do good in the world, in spite of the prejudice and cruelty that afflicts us all.
August 2025
Dr. Okapal is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Missouri Western State University. His teaching includes courses in ethics, environmental ethics, social and political philosophy, and reasoning and argumentation.
1.) How did you first become involved with the Popular Culture Association, and what inspired you to join the Board? A Missouri Western State University colleague of mine, Trish Donaher, was a member of the PCA. We began to work on a joint paper published under the title “Causation, Prophetic Visions, and the Free Will Problem in Harry Potter.” An early draft of this was presented at the Midwest American Culture Conference in 2007. By 2009, with Trish’s encouragement, I started going to the PCA conferences and have come every year since. I decided to join the board because there were several members who wanted to help ensure that the PCA continues to be a safe home for people interested in popular and American culture. They convinced me that my professional experiences, which include being a department chair and working on hospital ethics committees, could be helpful in preserving and improving the PCA by working on the Governing Board. I started as a non-Board member of the Ethics Committee, became elected as a trustee-at-large, became the chair of the Ethics Committee, and just recently was selected to be the Chair of the Governing Board. 2.) Could you tell us a bit about your specific research interests within popular culture studies? My Ph.D. is in philosophy with a focus on ethical, social, and political theory. But I grew up in a household that watched Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Blazers, had a subscription to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and bookshelves filled with paperback copies of Tolkien, Le Guin, Zelazny, Robert Aspirin, Anne McCaffery, Marion Zimmer Bradley and many other sci-fi and fantasy authors. Trish Donaher convinced me that I could meld these two interests. For the past decade my research has looked at the way issues of moral status—what it means to identify an entity as member of the moral community and not a thing—are presented in science fiction and fantasy. I am currently working on a project looking at how depictions of artificial life, aliens, cyborgs, and hybrids in science fiction upends the traditional philosophical understanding of the relationship between moral status and moral agency. 3.) What does the PCA community mean to you? The PCA, even more than my home institution, is my professional home. It is where I have the most fun, it has provided the most opportunities, offers continuous encouragement, and whose members cultivate the most fertile ground for me to explore my interest in the intersection of philosophy and literature. Without the PCA, I’m not sure I could have achieved tenure or stayed in academia through the pandemic, but the people I meet at the PCA give me strength to continue doing this work that I love. 4.) Outside of your work and research, what's a favorite hobby or a fun fact about you that most people might not know? As an interesting fact, I was born in Bowling Green, Ohio, the birthplace of the PCA, in the same year that Ray Browne and Russell Nye created the PCA. Decades later I received my M.A. in Philosophy from BGSU, and at least 3 other members of my family have a degree from BGSU. In my vanishingly small spare time I like to play table top games with my family. 5.) What's one aspect of your academic or professional journey that you're particularly proud of? What I am most proud of professionally is all the support I have been able to give other people in advancing their own research into pop culture and philosophy. In terms of the PCA, I was the Area Chair for Philosophy and Culture from 2012-2016 and 2021-2024. The work I did here, and the people I met at the PCA, were central to being offered the role of Series Editor for McFarland’s Ethics and Culture Series (contact me if you have a book idea) and my work as Book Review Editor for the Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy. Together, these three activities provide me the opportunity to support others as we create a community advancing the interconnections of academia
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