Randolph-Macon College Humanities Professor M. Thomas Inge ’59 has been awarded the highest honor offered by the national Popular Culture Association (PCA). Inge, the Blackwell Professor of Humanities, was presented the Lynn Bartholome Eminent Scholar Award for 2018 at PCA’s annual meeting, which was held March 28-31 in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The award recognizes distinguished scholars who have made significant and lasting contributions to the study of popular and American culture. The PCA promotes the study of popular culture throughout the world through the establishment and promotion of conferences, publications and discussion.

The PCA and M. Thomas Inge ’59
The first meeting of the Popular Culture Association took place in 1971 at Michigan State University, where Inge had taught in the Department of American Thought and Language. Along with a group of like-minded colleagues from a variety of disciplines across the nation, he felt the need for an outlet for research in popular culture.

“Most of the traditional disciplines actively discouraged the study of things like film, television, popular music, and the comics, and their conference program committees turned down such proposals,” says Inge.

The PCA founders helped establish a journal and began planning for an annual conference, which would ultimately attract thousands of scholars taking an interdisciplinary approach to the study of popular culture.

Inge’s major contribution would be the organizing and editing of the multi-volume Handbook of American Popular Culture for Greenwood Press, the ultimate aim of which was to define and establish the outlines of what constitutes popular culture. The project went through three editions and received an award from the American Library Association as an outstanding reference work. Inge also started two reference book series with Greenwood Press and a critical studies series with the University Press of Mississippi.

Within the new association, Inge began to encourage the study of his first love, comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels.

The comic art division of the association became the largest area of interest besides science fiction. He now serves as general editor for Mississippi of the “Great Comic Artists” series and the award-winning “Conversations with Comic Artists” series. Inge has himself written or edited more than a dozen books about the comics.

Since 1996, the comics area of the PCA has awarded the M. Thomas Award for Comics Scholarship to the author of the best paper delivered at each annual convention.

Inge, who earned his B.A. at Randolph-Macon College and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University, teaches a variety of courses at Randolph-Macon College, including American Humor, Graphic Narrative, Animation in American Culture, and Walt Disney’s America. In addition, he has for many years, since he served as chair of the English department at Virginia Commonwealth University, contributed his research collection to the university libraries. It stands now as one of the major comics research collections in the United States.