Jutta Weldes is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Bristol, UK. Her current research interests centre on, among other things, popular culture and world politics. In this area, she has written on Star Trek and US foreign policy, Issac Asimov’s SF and globalisation, the Buffyverse, and the theorisation of in/security (with Christina Rowley), and is editor of To Seek Out New Worlds: Science Fiction and World Politics (Palgrave: 2003). She is also the author of Constructing National Interests: The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), co-editor of Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), and has published in such journals as International Studies Quarterly, Security Dialogue, the European Journal of International Relations, Millennium and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations.

Christina Rowley is a Research Associate in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. She studies the various intersections between popular culture and world politics, often with a particular focus on gender and/or US foreign policy. Her work has appeared in Security Dialogue, the British Journal of Politics and International Relations and the International Feminist Journal of Politics. Her current research focuses on the ways in which mainstream IR, as a set of disciplinary practices, both incorporates and marginalises popular culture as a legitimate object of study.