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For many, the word “emo” calls to mind angsty teenagers, shaggy black haircuts, and skinny jeans. A popular music phenomenon in the early 2000s, emo is short for “emotional hardcore,” and refers to both a music genre and a youth scene notable for its androgynous style. Judith May Fathallah pushes beyond the stereotypes and social stigma to explore how online fandom has shaped the definition of emo, with significant implications both for millennial constructs of gender and for contemporary fan studies.

First laying out the debate over what emo is, Fathallah walks superfans and newcomers through the culture surrounding thegenre’s major bands, including the emo holy trinity: My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and Panic! At the Disco. Next she examines fans’ main mode of participation in the emo subculture—online communities such as LiveJournal, Tumblr, MySpace, and band websites. Taking a hard look at the gender politics that dominated those spaces, she unearths a subculture that simultaneously defines itself by its sensitivity and resistance to traditional forms of masculinity, yet ruthlessly enforces homophobic and sexist standards. Fathallah demonstrates fandom’s key role in defining emo as a concept and genre after 2001, with probing insight into its implications for gender constructions through popular music.

Though contributors write from a variety of methodological positions and address themselves to a range of archives, they share the primary conviction that the impact of Web 2.0 on literary practice is far-reaching, far from self-evident, and far more variegated and unpredictable than easy summations of social media’s influence suggest. Expressive Networks asks after poetry’s present and future by examining what poems themselves express about the social make-up of networked platforms.

Edited by Matthew Kilbane with contributions from Cameron Awkward-Rich, Micah Bateman, Andrew Campana, Sumita Chakraborty, Scott Challener, C.R. Grimmer, Tess McNulty, Michael Nardone, Seth Perlow, Anna Preus, Susanna Sacks, Carly Schnitzler, Melanie Walsh, and Samuel Caleb Wee.

For decades, we’ve been warned that video killed the radio star, and, more recently, that social media has replaced reading. Nerdfighteria, a first-of-its-kind online literary community with nearly three million members, challenges these assumptions. It is the brainchild of brothers Hank and John Green, who provide literary themed programming on their website and YouTube channel, including video clips from John, a best-selling author most famous for his young adult book, The Fault in Our Stars. These clips not only give fans personal insights into his works and the writing process writ large, they also provide unique access to the author, inspiring fans to create their own fan art and make connections with one another.

In the twenty-first century, reading and watching videos are related activities that allow people to engage with authors and other readers. Whether they turn to The Fault in Our Stars or titles by lesser-known authors, Nerdfighters are readers. Incorporating thousands of testimonials about what they read and why, Jennifer Burek Pierce not only sheds light on this particular online community, she also reveals what it tells us about the changing nature of reading in the digital age. In Nerdfighteria, we find a community who shows us that being online doesn’t mean disinterest in books.

Winner of the 2025 MLA Scaglione Prize for African Studies

Simultaneously transnational and local, poetry in the twenty-first century is produced across digital networks, shaped through local communities, and evaluated on a global scale. It might start on social media, where a video of a poet circulates and goes viral, gaining international attention without ever going through traditional modes of publication. In Networked Poetics, Susanna L. Sacks introduces readers to the southern African poetry scene in Malawi, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, illustrating how contemporary poetry is shaped, from inception to canonization, by the influence of digital media publication.

Interweaving ethnographic observation and extensive literary analysis, Sacks demonstrates that, as more artists in Africa reach wider audiences through online publication, poetic form has shifted to reflect social media’s aesthetic norms of urgency, immediacy, and populism. These changes have, in turn, challenged elite processes of valuation, forcing literary institutions like prizes, festivals, and curricula to accommodate the digital turn.

"By casting the collection explicitly as an outreach to the larger community of Americanists---not primarily those who self-identify as 'digital scholars'---Earhart and Jewell have made an important choice, and one that will likely make this a landmark publication."
---Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia

The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, which features a wide range of practitioner-scholars, is the first of its kind: a gathering of people who are expert in American literary studies and in digital technologies, scholars uniquely able to draw from experience with building digital resources and to provide theoretical commentary on how the transformation to new technologies alters the way we think about and articulate scholarship in American literature. The volume collects articles from those who are involved in tool development, usability testing, editing and textual scholarship, digital librarianship, and issues of race and ethnicity in digital humanities, while also situating digital humanities work within the larger literary discipline. In addition, the volume examines the traditional structures of the fields, including tenure and promotion criteria, modes of scholarly production, the skill sets required for scholarship, and the training of new scholars.

The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age will attract practitioners of digital humanities in multiple fields, Americanists who utilize digital materials, and those who are intellectually curious about the new movement and materials.

Amy E. Earhart is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Texas A&M University.

Andrew Jewell is Associate Professor of Digital Projects, University Libraries, at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Cover art: Book background ©iStockphoto.com/natashika

digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.