In the Vox podcast In a Nutshell, hosts Jara Majerus and Antonia Leise take a deep dive into the university's most interesting, strange, and exciting research. Every two weeks, they invite Radboud researchers to talk about their favourite topics – explained in bite-sized episodes. In today's episode, Antonia talks with Julia Neugarten about the fantastic world of fanfiction studies.

Have you ever watched a movie or read a book, thinking: ‘I’d like to read more of this’? Then you are in luck because there probably is – in the form of fanfiction. And PhD student Julia Neugarten studies them.

The eighth episode of In a Nutshell is entirely dedicated to this fascinating piece of online subculture and literary genre. And from its origins in the 1960s to the more than 14 million works published on the fanfiction open-source repository Archive of Our Own today – Julia knows all about it.

So, what makes people write and publish stories for free? What has Star Trek to do with homoerotic fanfiction? And what do authors think about fanfictions of their work? Listen in and find out.

Would you like to learn more about fanfiction? Then have a look at Julia’s tip and read Francesca Coppa’s book The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age (2017) – or dive in directly with the fanfiction of your choice on Archive of Our Own.