“Appropriate to its title, this collection is filled with detours, regressions, and asides, delightful and always instructive. Each essay is a work of old-fashioned scholarship, and each is an exploration rather than an attempt to prove a point. The contributors delve, backtrack, then dive in again, exploring backgrounds of American culture leading to a number of current stereotypes. The book is part of a series titled "The Year's Work: Studies in Fan Culture and Cultural Theory," which plays on stodgy academic formulae and allows for freedom of research and thought that eludes too many contemporary academics and that is sorely missed by the curious even far from the ivory towers. The nerds, wonks, and neocons of the title are no joke, but they are the entryway for exploring the broad aspects of the American experience that have been developing for well more than a century. Sometimes, to be effective, studies need to deliberately dismantle previous perceptions and assumptions, or least provoke questions about them. By looking in cultural corners generally avoided, and with the freedom to follow whatever leads they notice, the contributors to this volume show how cultural studies should be conducted in a vast and various society such as the US's. Summing Up: *** Essential. All readers.”

A. J. Barlow, CHOICE, Oct. 2017

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Working in and on Nerds, Wonks, and Neo-Cons, this Year and to Come / Jonathan P. Eburne and Benjamin Schreier
1. Wonk Masculinity / Dennis Allen
2. Surface Worship, Super-Public Intellectuals, and the Suspiciously Common Reader / William J. Maxwell
3. Stratigraphic Form: Science Fictions of the Present / Warren Liu
4. Obsession, Pathology, and Justice: Nerds, Bodies, Winsor McCay, and the 1893 Chicago Fair / Nathan L. Grant
5. The Neoconservative Imagination / Jennifer Glaser
6. Conservative and Internationalist: George S. Schuyler's Pulp Fiction and The Imperialism of The Oppressed / Sara Marzioli
7. The Turing Test and Other Love Songs / Brian Glavey
8. Sex and the Single Nerd: The Schizo Saga of Genes, Genius, and Finally Getting Some / Judith Roof
9. Nerds in Capes: Courtly Love and the Erotics of Medievalism / Jamie Taylor
10. Comic Book Kid/ Scott T. Smith
11. Walking Simulators, #GamerGate, and the Gender of Wandering / Melissa Kagen
12. The Fan as Public Intellectual in "RaceFail '09" / Siobhan Carroll
13. Autism, Nerds, and Insecurity / Chloe Silverman
Afterword: Professors Without Chairs / Aaron S. Lecklider
Index