Bowling Green State’s pop culture studies helps us understand world
Jeffrey Brown says he’s a fan of everything.
Step into his office at Bowling Green State University and see for yourself. His bookcases are stacked with titles like “Forbidden Hollywood,” “Comic Book Nation” and “Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom.” Movie posters for the neo-noir action films “Bullitt” and “Dirty Harry” lean against one wall. A set of Batman coffee mugs rests above the coffeemaker.
Brown’s interests aren’t mere hobbies, though. They’re also academic.
Brown is a professor and chair in the Department of Popular Culture and the School of Critical and Cultural Studies at Bowling Green. It is the only university in the U.S. to have an undergraduate and graduate department devoted to the scholarly study of pop culture, according to BGSU.
Started by longtime BGSU professor Ray Browne in 1973, the department has been an international leader in the study of popular culture.
Browne often is credited with coining the term “popular culture,” but its origins go back much further than his tenure. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first reported use of the phrase dates back to at least 1854, when it appeared in print in The Defiance Democrat in Defiance, Ohio.
Browne popularized the term, though, said Nancy Down, associate professor and head librarian of BGSU’S Ray & Pat Browne Library for Popular Culture Studies.
“The Midwest is the birthplace of popular culture,” Down said.
‘We don’t know our own culture’
Brown, who has taught in the department for 24 years, received his master’s degree from the program in 1991.
Originally from Canada, Brown’s undergraduate and PH.D. study is in anthropology. Anthropologists traditionally did much of their research by parachuting into other countries to learn about cultures beyond our borders. But much of that practice was rooted in colonialism, Brown said, and after a “crisis of conscience” within the field, many anthropologists had a realization.
“We’ve been spending all of this time studying other’s cultures, but we came up learning we don’t know our own culture,” he said.
Bowling Green’s popular culture students study the impact of pop culture through a variety of media and research methods — television, movies, music, books and magazines, sports, holidays, dance and folklore — to understand our culture and how it reflects and impacts our societal values.
Undergraduate courses include Intersections of Gender, Race & Culture; Global Popular Culture; Television as Popular Culture; Black Popular Culture; and Contexts of Popular Music.
As students excel through the program, they have the option to take more specialized courses. Next semester’s offerings include Black Women in American TV & Visibility; Youth and Popular Culture; TV Comedy; Fataphobia & Body Positivity; and Rock Music Subcultures.
“In any culture, we’re shaped by these big ideas that we don’t question,” Brown said. “Our goal is to ask, ‘Where do those come from?’”
By now, Brown is used to people trivializing the scholarly study of pop culture. But that doesn’t mean he agrees with it.
“It gets treated as fluff, which is unfair,” he said. “To treat it as meaningless, even though we’re all involved in it, is the epitome of hypocrisy.”
He often gets asked what he calls “the parent question,” which sounds something like “Is this degree valuable?” or “Will my kid be able to get a job?”
His answers are yes and yes.
Many of Brown’s former students have gone on to have successful careers in marketing, entertainment and media, and a few have helped produce the Oscars and Emmys. Others go on to work in museums and other cultural institutions. The vast majority of the program’s graduate students go on to get a PH.D. and enter academia.
“Considering that pop culture is an aspect of life we’re all exposed to, any business related to culture or entertainment would say this is valuable education.”
Documenting the history of pop culture
Bowling Green State University is also home to the Ray & Pat Browne Library for Popular Culture Studies. The stacks at this library hold a lot more than just books.
Nearly floor-to-ceiling bookshelves house boxes full of Mcdonald’s Happy Meal toys, Beanie Babies and Mr. Potato Heads. Catalogues of Soap Opera Digest and the National Inquirer are just around the corner from dozens of movie scripts and press kits. There’s an entire section dedicated to romance novels.
Some of the items seem like they belong in a college dorm room or your parents’ basement, but not an academic library.
But therein lies its value, head librarian Down said.
The library was founded in 1969 and boasts a collection of close to 200,000 cataloged items. With a focus on popular culture post1876, the collection spans from “nickel weeklies” fiction magazines dating back to the 1890s to the latest edition of TV Guide.
It is also a member of the Consortium of Popular Culture Collections in the Midwest, a regional networking effort formalized in 1990. The consortium includes such other state institutions as Ohio State University, Kent State University, Oberlin College and the Ohio History Connection, as well as Michigan State University.
While other schools have more-tailored collections — like Ohio State’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library or Kent State’s Borowitz Collection of true crime items — Bowling Green’s library is a menagerie of all this popular culture. It is the most comprehensive archive of its kind in the U.S., Down said.
Much of the collection is donated by private collectors, academics and people in the entertainment industry who want to protect these artifacts. When a Los Angeles script library was closed several years ago, for example, someone sent its collection to Bowling Green for safekeeping.
After more than five decades of acquiring items, Down said, the library is a little pickier about what it accepts. She’s mostly trying to fill in the gaps and pay attention to what might be the next big thing.
“Anticipating what is popular culture is difficult,” Down said. “It’s hard to know what’s going to be enduring.”
Down said there’s a great value in having such a vast collection because of the connections you can make. Marvel, for instance, isn’t only about superheroes. It engulfs movies, TV shows, advertising, press kits, greeting cards, merchandise and so much more.
Making those connections is vitally important to us understanding the world we live in and how we interact with one another, said John King, who got his master’s in popular culture at BGSU and is halfway through his PH.D. in American culture.
King was flipping through a pile of propaganda posters from World War I at the library on a recent Wednesday afternoon. That blatant patriotism from more than a century ago is something he still sees in today’s news headlines, he said.
Culture — and who controls it — is still very much a forefront political issue for many folks right now. But learning with one another, King said, could be the key to closing some of those gaps.
“If we don’t understand our culture, we have a dark road ahead,” King said. “Cultural studies, I truly believe, could be our way into a brighter future.”