I just got back from the 2013 National Conference of the Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association in Washington, DC, and all I can say is, it was a blast.

What made the conference so refreshing is that it covered so many different disciplines, including — to name just a few of the many subject areas — Academics and Collegiate Culture; Adaptation in Film, TV, Literature and Videogames; African-American Culture; American Indian Literature and Cultures; Animation; Appalachian Studies; Black Music Culture and Hip Hop; Body and Physical Difference; Border Studies, Cultural Economy and Migration; Brazilian Popular Culture; Film, in all its various historical, genre, and theoretical aspects; Eastern European Studies; Ecology and Culture; Education, Teaching, History and Popular Culture; Eros, Pornography and Popular Culture; Fairy Tales; Fan Culture and Theory; Journalism and Media Culture; Language Attitudes and Popular Linguistics; Latin American Film and Media; Latin American Literature and Culture; Law and Popular Culture; Literature and Madness; Literature and Politics; Material Culture — and the list goes on and on.

The conference program was more than 500 pages long, and each of the disciplines above had multiple panels, with a nice mix of newcomers and established scholars to keep things on the cutting edge. The hotel itself was the perfect venue for the event, offering reasonably priced rooms, excellent conference facilities with great technical backup, and a superb location just minutes from the Smithsonian and the National Gallery, which by the way was hosting a superb show of Pre-Raphaelite art, staggering in its complexity and aggressive Romanticism — and, of course, free and open to the public.

The panels themselves were lively and informative, the book room was bursting with interesting new volumes from a wide range of publishers on every discipline under the sun, and there was even a “paper exchange” where scholars left ten copies of their papers for others to peruse, and perhaps publish in journals — an excellent idea more conferences should adopt. I was continually impressed with how smoothly the conference ran, and although most of the participants stayed in the main hotel, things never seemed crowded or out of hand — the whole process was clean, professional, and very well managed.

We spent four nights of engaging intellectual discussion with friends old and new, and I think the PCA/ACA National Conference has been underestimated by a lot of people, who may only be familiar with the regional PCA/ACA conferences, which are interesting but necessarily more modest. Here, there were literally thousands of people exchanging ideas, opinions, discoveries, presenting papers of the highest standard, and in an atmosphere of marked egalitarianism that made the entire conference all the more engaging and attractive. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

The 2014 National Conference is in Chicago from April 16 – April 19. Perhaps I’ll see you there.