It’s not every day you see a slide of Gerard Way captioned with the word “cunttttt” at an academic conference.
But EmoCon 2026, also called “A Conference … But It’s Midwest(ern) Emo,” was not your average scholastic event. Convened at Washington University this April, it was the first-ever academic conference devoted solely to emo studies. Around 70 attendees showed up in person while another 100 or so tuned in online, jumping from Zoom room to Zoom room to watch presentations with titles like “There’s No ‘I’ in Team: Agency and Individualism over Three Decades of Emo Music” and “I’m Not Okay-fabe: The Complex Position of Audience in My Chemical Romance’s ‘Long Live’ Tour.”
You can’t write titles like that without colorful PowerPoints to back them up.
Even through a laptop screen, the excitement was undeniable — especially as Steve Lamos, drummer for American Football and Associate Professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, delivered his opening keynote. His talk (about writing with instead of about the embodied experience of revisiting nostalgic music) felt like a call to be more mindful when re-engage with the music from our pasts. That’s a tall order, considering how effectively our nostalgia has already been commodified.
As an academic conference, EmoCon feels like an antidote to that kind of blind consumerism. Each of its presentations interrogated the genre’s influences and impact, illuminating the cultural, political, and societal context that made the movement so big in the first place. Appropriately enough, co-organizers Varun Chandrasekhar and Patrick Mitchell came up with the idea at another academic convention in Minneapolis in 2023, where Patrick was presenting a paper about misogyny in emo. A couple years later, when a funding opportunity emerged, Patrick sent Varun a text: “Hey, is this the year?” And thus, EmoCon was born.
I chatted with Varun and Patrick after the con to discuss how it went, why they want to start an emo scholars association, and how the genre has evolved over time.
