Guest Lecture by Jannis Buschky, M.A. (University of Konstanz)

Vanishing Oil in John Joseph Mathews’s Sundown (1934)

January 22, 2026, 6-8pm, P 6 (Philosophicum)

When Osage writer John Joseph Mathews wrote his novel Sundown (1934) about the Osage oil boom in the early twentieth century, he faced a long-standing stereotype about indigenous peoples in the US. The myth of the “Vanishing Indian” confined indigenous peoples in a static past and thus made notions of modernity and indigeneity incongruent in literary and public discourse. In this presentation, I will consider the concept of vanishing in Mathews’s Sundown from the perspective of the energy humanities, a relatively new field which explores the relationship between energy and literature. The foundational premise of the energy humanities, especially as they relate to oil, posits that oil is structurally omnipresent yet largely invisible. Thinking capaciously about the relationship between the invisibility of oil as a normative experience of energy and vanishing as a racialized form of settler history, I read Sundown’s representations of oil as its most potent site where the novel negotiates indigenous absence and presence. My proposition is that Mathews places oil at the center of his interrogation of the vanishing myth. Specifically, I argue that Mathews’s attempt to formulate an indigenous modernity generates an inversed vanishing narrative: rather than crafting a portrayal of oil extraction at the cost of indigenous erasure, Sundown presents oil itself as vanishing in various forms to consolidate an indigenous modernity.

Guest Lecture by Christianna Stavroudis, M.Sc. (Bonn)

Guest Lecture by Teresa Fischler (University of Passau)

Guest Lecture by Dr. Matt Hills (University of Bristol)

“This is Very Much Not On-Message for DWM”: The Commercial Fan Magazine Between Fandom and Brandom — Doctor Who Magazine in the Disney/“RTD2” Era

December 2, 2025, 6-8pm, P 6 (Philosophicum)

This talk will build on my analysis, in the Wiley Handbook of Magazine Studies, of the commercial fan magazine as a type of publication marked by fan-journalists’ “double-time” (Hills 2020). I also addressed the “intra-franchise fandom” characterising the officially-licensed Doctor Who Magazine’s production team (ibid). DWM is unusually long-running, and can be traced back to Doctor Who Weekly (1979-80). The Magazine has variously been analysed as a space in which fan interpretations became more sophisticatedly auteurist (Booy 2012), and as the beginning of official, TV-production attempts to paratextually orient fan readings (Sandifer 2014). The tension between these two types of reading illustrates how the commercial fan magazine remains caught between priorities of branding and giving a voice to “grassroots” fandom. This splitting has been widely testified to in fan studies, with its binaries of affirmational/transformational fandom (Hills 2014); of “new industry-driven” and “traditional” fans (Busse and Gray 2014); of “brand fans” versus “traditional fans” (Linden and Linden 2017: 37), and discussions of “corporatized fandom” (Booth 2019: 29).

However, the commercial fan magazine has to continually find ways of hybridising or combining these versions of “fandom” and “brandom” (Guschwan 2012) in its address. Considering this duality, I will focus on the magazine’s 2022 rebranding after it was announced that Russell T Davies would be returning to show-run the TV programme for a second time, and that Disney would be Doctor Who’s co-producer and global distributor outside the UK. Along with undergoing a re-brand, DWM also welcomed a new editor from issue 595 in 2023. Different editorial eras have been a focus of fanzine analysis (see e.g. Kilburn 2017 and Kibble-White 2017), though the current ‘era’ has yet to receive sustained fan commentary. I will consider how the “Disney Doctor Who” or “RTD2” incarnation of DWM under Jason Quinn’s editorship has distinctively engaged with contemporary norms of branded, franchised cultural production.

Dr. Matt Hills is an honorary Professor at the University of Bristol, and formerly a Professor of Fandom Studies at the University of Huddersfield. He is the author of a number of monographs, beginning with Fan Cultures (Routledge 2002), and has co-edited collections such as Adventures Across Space and Time: A Doctor Who Reader (Bloomsbury 2023) and, most recently, Theatre Fandom (University of Iowa Press 2025). Recent publications include 2025 book chapters in the following edited collections: The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom: Second Edition, Entering the Multiverse (also Routledge) and Affect in Fandom (Amsterdam University Press), with work forthcoming in further collections such as Bridging Design and Fandom (Emerald) and Acquiring Fan Lifestyles (University of Michigan Press).