Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Academics descend on St. Augustine for scholarly side of ’Buffy’

The Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses 4 runs through Sunday. Registration information is available at www.slayageonline.com

ST. AUGUSTINE — The legacies of history’s most influential heroines live on long after they’re gone.

Statues of Joan of Arc are planted in public parks across the globe. Susan B. Anthony’s likeness is emblazoned on coins. And even after vacating the airwaves seven years ago, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” still occupies the imaginations of legion.

That’s abundantly clear in St. Augustine this weekend , where more than a hundred academics have massed to discuss the life and times of the supernatural TV character and her rogue’s gallery of evil-doers.

Flagler College is hosting the four-day conference, which includes presentations and lectures from an international assortment of scholars.

Jim Wilson, a Flagler English professor and conference coordinator, said the event’s full title — The Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses 4 — is a mouthful. But it couldn’t be narrowed down to just Buffy.

“She might be the biggest star, but her creator, Joss Whedon, is the man of the hour,” Wilson said.

Whedon also created “Angel,” a “Buffy” spinoff featuring a vampire with a soul, and “Firefly,” an ensemble drama set in space that borrowed heavily from Western movies.

Whedon’s body of work has inspired millions of fans through his creative use of dialogue and inventive storytelling. Academics have also latched onto his shows as potential teaching tools for their use of dramatic archetypes and dense mythology.

Wilson said his wife, Tamara, another Flager English professor, turned him on to Whedon’s work. They’ve both used examples from the shows in their classrooms.

“His storytelling and how it relates to our world, it resonates with students,” she said. “The classics are great. But pop culture crosses boundaries in and out of the classroom.”

That’s the mantra of the Slayage Conference. The biennial event unites gray-haired and tenured career academics with youthful independent scholars for a probing look into the Whedonverse. Despite all the analysis of his work, Whedon has yet to make an appearance at any of the previous conferences.

This year’s presentation titles ranged from the sexual — “The girl needs a little monster in her man” — to the strangely topical — “’Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”

Rows of books penned by Whedon devotees and “Slayage” T-shirts with blood-dripping font were on sale inside Flagler’s Ringhaver Student Center as participants milled around between presentations.

Jen Stuller, a Seattle-based freelance writer, is a conference fixture. She views Buffy as a positive role-model for young women and lauded Whedon as a rarity in Hollywood — a male writer with an innate understanding of the fairer sex.

“He gets us,” she said. “Women aren’t just caricatures in his shows.”

Her love of Whedon’s work inspired her to pen her own book, “Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology.” It analyzes how female heroines in pop culture have evolved over the past century, Buffy being chief among them.

“Every so often, there comes along a female character that’s so iconic that she inspires the characters that come after her,” Stuller said. “Wonder Woman did that in the ’30s. And Buffy’s the Wonder Woman of the ’90s. She definitely changed the face of the female on TV forever, and Joss’ writing was what made it happen.”

David Lavery couldn’t agree more. The Middle Tennessee State University English professor is a renowned Whedonite. He’s vice president of the newly formed Whedon Studies Association, a consortium of scholars who analyze the subtext behind the Whedonverse. He even wore a black T-shirt sporting a “Star Wars”-esque font declaring “Joss Whedon is my master now.”

“I’ve been asked a lot of times, ’Why Buffy?’” Lavery said. “Well, with all of the pop culture references, trivia and in-jokes Joss Whedon crammed into every episode, it makes me feel like my degree wasn’t worthless. That’s as good a reason as any.”