Popular Culture and Public Memory explores the ways in which, particularly in volatile and fragmented times, contemporary popular culture in the United States evokes the past to make sense of the present.

This edited collection examines how contemporary pop culture, from traditional to emerging media, informs, commodifies, and even distorts what we know - or think we know - about who we are and where we come from as a collective. It features essays on topics ranging from the (re)emergence of tradwife aesthetics to nu-metal on TikTok; the ways in which both traditional and digital forms of narrative media gatekeep the collective pasts of LGBTQ+, women’s, Black, and Latinx histories; and how social media content creators and platforms privilege a specific aesthetic of the past through social media influence and algorithmic content curation. The essays not only examine how popular culture represents aspects of the American cultural past but also interrogate the problems that come with gatekeeping, privileging, and packaging and selling specific versions of our shared, collective vision of it.

This collection will be of interest to students and scholars in multiple fields, including media and communication studies, cultural studies, and American studies, particularly those interested in public memory, nostalgia, and mediated popular culture.

Lisa M. Burns is Professor of Media Studies at Quinnipiac University, USA. Her research focuses on media coverage of US presidents and their spouses, political branding, and public memory. She is the editor of Media Relations and the Modern First Lady (2020), The Cambridge Companion to US First Ladies (2025), and Media, History, and Memory: A Critical Perspective (2026).

Carrie T. Isard is Associate Professor and Chair of the Communication and Media Studies department at Niagara University, USA. Her research interests include memory studies, popular culture, and media representation. She is the author of Looking at the Stars: Black Celebrity Journalism in Jim Crow America (2019) and the co-curator of The Adolescentia Project digital archive.