Abstract

Fan studies has a long tradition of framing fandom as active, creative, and participatory. Yet, scholarship on film and television fans has primarily investigated fandom and fan practices in relation to the consumption, production, and criticism of fictional texts. In turn, non-fiction texts and fan practices have found considerably less attention. However, as this dissertation demonstrates, fans are active and creative participants in assembling, preserving, restoring, and disseminating materials from the past and in transforming these materials into print and online publications, podcasts, video tutorials, documentaries, and museum exhibitions. Drawing from the field of public history and the idea of a “participatory historical culture,” this dissertation conceptualizes and examines fans as producers and distributors of historical knowledge through the textual analysis of a wide range of fan-made histories of the Star Wars franchise. This dissertation foregrounds practices, objects, and networks that so far have found little attention in fan studies: the distinct forms of historical media fans produce; community structures and hierarchies with historians and history-making at their centre; fan historians’ relationship to the media industries; fan contribution to cultural heritage initiatives; the impact of fan labor in specific local contexts and beyond the media industries. As such, this dissertation shows how history-making is central to the formation, maintenance, and shaping of individual and collective fan identities and memories.