History and Team

Established in 2015 by Danny Graydon and Dr Barbara Brownie in collaboration with Inter-Disciplinary.Newt, The Superhero Project was the first academic conference solely dedicated to the superhero genre, initially run at Mansfield College in Oxford. Following the demise of I-D.net, The Superhero Project became a collaboration between Graydon - an academic with University of Hertfordshire, UK - and Dr Torsten Caeners of University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, who was a delegate at the first edition of the conference. The Superhero Project was revived in late 2019 with its third edition in Mulheim an Der Ruhr in Germany, where it continues to run.

The Superhero Project has quickly distinguished itself as an invigoratingly diverse showcase of critical coverage of the superhero genre, amply demonstrating the scope of potential thereby illuminating what is a truly vibrant area of pop culture scholarship. The project is currently gearing up for it's fifth global conference, to be held between 10th and 12th September, 2021