Fanfiction is an immensely popular online phenomenon. Archive of Our Own, the biggest online repository of English-language fanfiction, currently hosts over 13 million stories, and more are added every day. What do these stories reveal about topics and perspectives that remain underexplored in mainstream literary production? How do models of authorship or collaborative writing differ between fan-writers and professionals?

In this Creative Culture Talk scholars of fan culture – Nicolle Lamerichs and Julia Neugarten – will discuss the cultural relevance and popularity of fanfiction in comparison to mainstream literary production, together with speculative-fiction writer Roderick Leeuwenhart and third-year Arts and Culture student Rūta Tidriķe.

Nicolle Lamerichs is senior lecturer and team lead at Creative Business, HU University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht. She is the program coordinator of the MSc Sustainable Business Transition. She holds a PhD in media studies from Maastricht University (2014). She has written different books on fandom, including the English monograph Productive Fandom (2018) and the Dutch non-fiction work Leven als Fan (2024). Lamerichs has published peer-reviewed articles and chapters on fandom, media culture, cosplay and game practices.

Roderick Leeuwenhart writes science fiction stories with a quintessentially Dutch character – and often a link to Japan and East Asia. His most recent Dutch SF novels are The Gentlemen XVII (which takes place in a world where the Dutch East India Company never ceased to be) and Star Body (about a doomed mining crew inside a colossal alien corpse, also published in China). Roderick is a Harland Award winner and his short stories have been published in renowned magazines such as Nature, Future Fiction and Analog.

Rūta Tidriķe is a third-year student in the BA Arts and Culture Studies at Radboud University.

Julia Neugarten is a PhD-candidate in the department of Arts and Culture Studies at Radboud University. Her dissertation examines the way contemporary online fanfiction adapts and transforms Greek mythology. Her scholarly work has appeared in the Journal of Fandom Studies and the Journal of Computational Literary Studies. Julia is also an avid writer of creative non-fiction, in which she explores the boundaries between real life and fiction and between fannish and academic engagement.