As a popular culture scholar, I investigate the ways that mass media products allow producers to place meaning into and audiences to create meaning from such things as television shows, films, and graphic novels. These investigations allow me to combine a number of different methods including aesthetics, criticism, fan or audience interviews, genre study, and historical or cultural context research. I enjoy the wide variety of study this approach grants, although I frequently return to the superhero and science fiction genres. In recent projects I explored the history of the BBC's decades-old show Doctor Who, the sense of community that developed among players of HeroClix (a superhero table top combat game), and the ways that ABC's "Lost" offered no clear indication of its genre identity in the first two seasons. Currently, I am working on a project that looks at the way heroism functions in two different popular TV shows, the reality-game show "Who Wants to Be a Superhero?" and NBC's surprise hit "Heroes".