Rethinking Elvis

Decades after his passing, Elvis Presley remains one of popular music’s greatest icons. He was among the most successful, influential, socially significant, and controversial performers of the twentieth century, with a celebrity so indelible that every recent American president has negotiated its orbit. While much of the coverage of Elvis’ life concerns his personal history and musical ability, Rethinking Elvis pushes beyond the familiar to address Elvis’ branding, historical and geographic reception, heritage, and fan phenomenon. Using Elvis’ iconography as a point of departure, popular music scholars and historians contend with issues related to the performer’s whiteness, Southern identity, and gender, among others, in turn offering myriad opportunities to pursue new approaches in the emergent field of Elvis studies.

Mark Duffett is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Chester. After receiving degrees from Oxford University and the University of British Columbia, he completed his doctorate on Elvis fandom at the University of Wales in 1999. Since then, Dr. Duffett has established himself as an international scholar with keynotes at conferences in Finland, Portugal, and La Nouvelle Sorbonne in Paris. He has written for The Guardian, and been quoted in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and TheNew York Times. His books include Understanding Fandom (2013), Counting Down Elvis (2018), and Elvis: Roots, Image, Comeback, Phenomenon (2020).