From the Editors:

We are pleased to offer Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy as a peer-reviewed open-access journal! It is our hope that by presenting these articles in an open-access format, more individuals will access them, and contribute to the ongoing scholarly conversations.

It is fitting that the inaugural issue of Dialogue would be a special guest-edited issue on Popular Culture and the Classics, edited by Kirsten Day and Benjamin Haller, who serve as Area Chairs for Classical Representations in Popular Culture for Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA). The SWPACA is the affiliated organization for Dialogue, and from its members the Journal draws its Advisory Board, Editorial Board, and Editorial Staff, and, in this case, the editors for our first issue.

Reaffirming the position of Popular Culture scholars that the fields in which we research are many and broad, our inaugural issue, “ΚΑΛΟΝ ΑΝΘΡΩΠΙΝΟΥ ΒΙΟΥ ΚΑΤΟΠΤΡΟΝ”: Popular Culture as a Pedagogical Lens on Greco-Roman Antiquity, reaches into antiquity for its content. From this issue, we learn not only about modern popular culture but also about texts and cultures that were popular to the ancients. Across the issue, the articles indicate numerous ways in which the ongoing discussion of popular culture can be included in the higher education classroom.

The Editorial staff would like to thank the many people who contributed to the successful publication of this first issue of Dialogue, including the editorial board, guest editors, contributors, and the SWPACA executive team. We would like to recognize the special efforts of Peter Rollins, a pioneer in the field of popular culture and co-founder of the SWPACA organization. Peter offers the following introduction as a contextualization of where the organization started and how Dialogue is simultaneously the culmination of many years of popular culture studies in the Southwest and a means by which the field can move into the future:

In the salad days of our Southwest group, we did our best to preserve papers from the annual meetings. Our early “Proceedings” were enormous stacks of hard copies which were mailed in boxes to interested libraries, and when optical media became available, we moved to a CD format, with hundreds of papers recorded on the word-searchable medium. Now the SWPACA steps forward with its own journal, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, under the capable editorship of Lynnea Chapman King and Anna CohenMiller.

For 35 years, I have been hoping for such a permanent record of our work and I anticipate that all who care about the Southwest will follow Dialogue closely. Indeed, it will be a delight.

Peter C. Rollins
www.petercrollins.com

Developing this issue has been a delight and we look forward to continuing to work with Peter Rollins, members of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association, and contributors to this new venture.