The Cultural Life of James Bond

The Cultural Life of James Bond: Specters of 007 emanates from an undergraduate course I taught on “Understanding 007” in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University in 2014, which invited my students to identify potential gaps in existing scholarly debates on the James Bond franchise—especially in the wake of the unprecedented box office takings of Skyfall, the twenty-third Bond-feature from 2012. These in-class conversations shaped my inquiry into future directions for scholarship on 007, moving the debates beyond Ian Fleming’s novels and the Eon film series in order to arrive at an understanding of Bond’s literary and cinematic incarnations as contested sites of negotiation. This enterprise benefited significantly from my conversations with Meenasarani Linde Murugan, Seung-hoon Jeong, James Chapman, and Richard Allen. It may be something of a truism to conclude that The Cultural Life of James Bond would not have materialized without their sustained commitment to this project, but I owe these four eminent scholars my utmost gratitude.