page_title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
section_title: Academia
hierarchical_section_title: Buffy the Vampire Slayer / Cultural impact / Academia
caption_attribution_description: English actor Anthony Stewart Head and american actor Nicholas Brendon at the Oakland Super SlayerCon.
context_page_description: Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an American supernatural drama television series based on the 1992 film of the same name. It was created by Joss Whedon under his production tag, Mutant Enemy Productions, with later co-executive producers being Jane Espenson, David Fury, David Greenwalt, Doug Petrie, Marti Noxon, and David Solomon.
  The series premiered on March 10, 1997, on The WB and concluded on May 20, 2003, on UPN. The series narrative follows Buffy Summers, the latest in a line of young women known as "Vampire Slayers", or simply "Slayers". In the story, Slayers, or the "Chosen Ones", are chosen by fate to battle against vampires, demons, and other forces of darkness. Buffy wants to live a normal life, but as the series progresses, she learns to embrace her destiny. Like previous Slayers, Buffy is aided by a Watcher, who guides, teaches, and trains her. Unlike her predecessors, Buffy surrounds herself with a circle of loyal friends who become known as the "Scooby Gang".
  The series received critical and popular acclaim and usually reached between four and six million viewers on original airings.
context_section_description: Buffy is notable for attracting the interest of scholars of popular culture, as a subset of popular culture studies, and some academic settings include the show as a topic of literary study and analysis. National Public Radio describes Buffy as having a "special following among academics, some of whom have staked a claim in what they call 'Buffy Studies.'" Though not widely recognized as a distinct discipline, the term "Buffy studies" is commonly used amongst the peer-reviewed academic Buffy-related writings. The influence of Buffy on the depiction of vampires across popular culture has also been noted by anthropologists such as A. Asbjørn Jøn. Popular media researcher Rob Cover argued that Buffy and Angel speak to contemporary attitudes to identity, inclusion and diversity, and that critiquing the characters' long-narrative stories lends insight into the complexity of identity in the current era and the landscape of social issues in which those identities are performed.
  Critics have emerged in response to the academic attention the series has received. For example, Jes Battis, who authored Blood Relations in Buffy and Angel, admits that study of the Buffyverse "invokes an uneasy combination of enthusiasm and ire" and meets "a certain amount of disdain from within the halls of the academy". Nonetheless, Buffy eventually led to the publication of around twenty books and hundreds of articles examining the themes of the show from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including sociology, Speech Communication, psychology, philosophy, and women's studies. In a 2012 study by Slate, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was named the most studied pop culture work by academics, with more than 200 papers, essays, and books devoted to the series.
  The Whedon Studies Association produces the online academic journal Slayage and sponsors a biennial academic conference on the works of Whedon. The sixth "Biennial Slayage Conference", titled "Much Ado About Whedon", was held at California State University-Sacramento in late June 2014.
caption: Anthony Stewart Head and Nicholas Brendon at the Oakland Super SlayerCon fan convention
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