Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Teachers of all disciplines including history, philosophy, English, communications, sociology and psychology integrate Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer into their secondary and college classrooms, while others have formed full courses around the Buffy text itself. Editors Jodie A. Kreider and Meghan K. Winchell invite submissions for a new collection of essays on teaching using Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a key text and tool. Themes and examples may include, but are not limited to gender, race, class, various works of literature, philosophy, music, aesthetics, religion, feminism, science, technology, mythology, romanticism, education, language, imagery, symbolism, metaphor, narrative or parenting. This collection will combine the academic and the practical aspects of teaching by exploring the ways in which Buffy is taught in international secondary and post-secondary classrooms through both interdisciplinary and discipline-based approaches. It will focus on methodology and practice in order to encourage and guide others interested in adding Buffy to their pedagogy.

• How have you brought Buffy into the classroom (middle school, high school, college, the workplace)?
• What have been the benefits, drawbacks, and challenges of utilizing Buffy in these ways?
• What kinds of assignments and practices work well with Buffy?
• What specific methodologies have you used?
• How have students reacted to such practices?
• How effective is the show in connecting students to scholarship, issues, ideas, and disciplinary concepts beyond the Whedonverse?
• What reactions do students have to the use of popular culture, specifically Buffy in their courses?
• Which practices do they find most useful, and which do they reject or fail to appreciate?
• How do you integrate Slayage or other Whedon literature into your classroom?

We are particularly interested in incorporating a wide variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary discussions on various themes from an international community of scholars. For more information on the academic field of Whedon studies and scholarship on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, please see the Slayage Website at http://www.slayageonline.com

Please submit proposals of approximately 500 words (attached as a Microsoft Word document; the file name should include the letters BTVS), along with a curriculum vitae including full contact information to both mwinchel@nebrwesleyan.edu and jkreide2@du.edu by November 15, 2008. The deadline for first drafts will be February 2009 and the final drafts will be due late May 2009.

Jodie A. Kreider is an Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Lecturer at the University of Denver. A historian of Britain, Gender and Welsh Nationalism, she is in the second year of teaching a First Year Seminar titled “Gender, Feminism, Power & Pop Culture: Decoding Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Meghan K. Winchell is an Assistant Professor of History at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln. She is author of Good Girls, Good Food, Good Fun: The Story of USO Hostesses during World War II. For the past three years, she has taught an interdisciplinary course for first-year students entitled “Decoding Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Jodie Kreider
Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
2000 E. Asbury Ave.
Sturm Hall 457
University of Denver
Denver, CO 80208
(303) 871-2050
Email: jkreide2@du.edu