[1] Some definitions focus on media fandom,[2] and much study is limited to Western Anglophone sources, especially television and film.
[1][3][5][6] The fan historian Francesca Coppa draws attention to a 1975 book, Star Trek Lives!, by the non-academic authors Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak and Joan Winston.
[6] The field is generally considered to have been founded with a cluster of publications in 1992: Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture, by Henry Jenkins is considered particularly formative, and Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, by Camille Bacon-Smith, which pioneers an ethnographic approach, is also commonly cited.
[7] Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington identified three waves of fan studies in 2007: ethnographic research, which views fans collectively; cultural studies, considering the "replication of social and cultural hierarchies within fan- and subculture ... as a reflection and further manifestation of our social, cultural, and economic capital"; and what Paul Booth terms "everyday fandom", where fandom is considered to be "part of the fabric of our everyday lives" and the study of fandom is used to gain understanding of contemporary life.
[3] The focus subsequently broadened to consider other fannish practices, particularly fanvidding and other forms of fan film-making, as well as the intellectual property issues that fanworks often raise.
[1][2] Jenkins and other first-wave researchers characterised fans as "resistant" or "subversive" consumers, considering fandoms to represent a "democratic and socially progressive response" to the media industry; these early studies have since been characterised as "utopian" by Matt Hills, Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington, and others.