Popular Arts Conference 2024

The Popular Arts Conference (PAC) is an annual academic conference for the studies of the popular arts, including science/speculative fiction and fantasy literature, film, and other media, comic books, manga, graphic novels, anime, gaming, etc. PAC presentations are peer reviewed, based in scholarly research.

The mission of PAC is to promote scholarship on popular culture and to encourage the engagement between scholars and fans in order to deepen our understanding of comics and the other popular arts.

Currently, the conference takes place annually in Atlanta, GA at DragonCon, which is billed as “the largest multi-media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film in the universe!”

PAC is formerly known as the Comics and Popular Arts Conference or CPAC. We have changed our name to better represent the breadth of our work as well as to avoid confusion with groups and events with similar names or acronyms. While comics scholarship continues to be an exciting part of each year’s conference, we believe that this change better represents the diverse range of scholarly topics and approaches for which our Conference is known.

PAC is supported by the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University.

PAC Organizing Committee 

• Erin Gordon (Art Institute of Chicago) – Co-Chair, Programming Director
• Daniel Amrhein (Independent Scholar) – Co-Chair, Director of Communications
• Jillian Marie Browning (University of Alabama, Birmingham) – Co-Chair, Track Liaison
• Matthew J. Brown (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) – Founder, Track Liaison
• Richard Scott Nokes (Troy University) – Volunteer & Member Coordinator
• Kari Neely (Middle Tennessee State University) – Volunteer & Member Coordinator
• Johnathan Flowers (California State University, Northridge)