I think part of that was the interdisciplinary nature of my work, which is really more cultural history than lit crit (which to be honest really isn’t my thing) so I got approval and support from historians, sociologists, cultural studies people, media studies people etc. etc. as well as the literature people. Certainly my doing archival work was what got my research funded in the first place.

I do still hear about scholars struggling to be taken seriously for studying popular culture, but I also increasingly hear people doing more traditional literary studies bemoaning the fact that what they do isn’t sexy enough to get funding and wishing they could switch to sf or manga or something.

I suspect it’s also difficult because there’s enough trouble for many scholars (at least those affiliated with institutions, rather than independent) to justify studying sf literature, let alone the culture around it. In the literature department I recently left, the single scholar interested in science fiction (like the one interested in comics, and the one interested in detective fiction) was given such an absurd of grief, even denied tenure, because his work wasn’t valued that I can only imagine the result had he tried to justify reading letters about sf rather than the literature itself.

Of course, I’m basing this on a narrow survey, so I’m not sure how much this is the condition of individual institutions, and how much it’s endemic.