When a little more than a year ago I was invited to teach a course in film genre at the USC Cinema School, my first reaction was that I was born to teach a core class in American film genre. I could teach a class taking contemporary PhD students through the history of genre criticism and watch a mix of genre films – canonical and deep cuts, old and new.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the next wave of important work in genre theory would be coming through an engagement with the global production and circulation of genre films, the mutual influence of genre across the planet.  And so, without even fully knowing what I might mean by it, I proposed teaching a course on “film genre in the age of the global shuffle”.

Over the next few posts, Pop Junctions will share a collection of essays that emerged from this course. This post provides an introduction to this series of posts to provide context to the questions that continue to face genre studies today.