The more you know about "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the easier it is to understand why academics find it so fascinating. For one thing, over the course of six and a quarter seasons, Whedon has rarely allowed the plot to take conventional routes, which makes the show consistently refreshing. He's not afraid to face up to heartache and tragedy -- his characters are modern kids who speak in the pop vernacular and shop at the Gap, but the challenges that befall them (not to mention the ways in which they face up to them) are often operatic in their intensity.

Whedon has a feel for the classical forms of drama, from Greek tragedy to Shakespeare and beyond, and a firm grasp of (not to mention a love of) the more modern forms, like movie musicals. If you're used to thinking critically about art or literature, it's not such a stretch to apply those same modes of thinking to "Buffy."

And people found plenty of ways to apply them at Norwich. Kate Lambert, an independent scholar, delivered a paper called "The Fool (for Love): Spike as Trickster," comparing the roguish vampire with other characters who run manic circles around our cultural consciousness, like Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny and Easy Rider. ("What's a nice archetype like you doing in a program like this?" read one of her paper's subheadings.) Ann Davis, of the University of Newcastle, gave us "Passing for American: British and Vampire Identities in 'Buffy.'"

If she never did quite address the question of why it would be desirable for the show's English characters to pass for American (their Englishness only heightens their glamour quotient, at least from this American's point of view), she did note that most of the vampire characters in the show don't come from America (it's too young and unformed a country) and that the vampires look "almost human but not quite." (Which isn't so far off from the way some Americans seem to think that because they don't need a phrasebook when they visit Britain, they're not really in a foreign country.) Davis' paper, in addressing the way the vampire characters try to pass as humans, also made great use of one of Spike's greatest lines, spoken to Buffy in one of the show's most wrenching moments: "I know I'm a monster, but you treat me like a man."

Too many papers, too little time: I had to miss "Balderdash and Chicanery: Science and Beyond in 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer,'" "Leaves of Dark Willow: Beyond the Metaphor of Magical Addiction," and "'It'll Go Straight to Your Thighs': Food and Drink Issues in 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'" My own paper, for the record, was called "Modern and Mythical Sexuality in 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer,'" and it was part of the "Sex and Violence" session, which was supremely well attended (arguably for the name alone).

This is where Spike, the naked version, came in: Before beginning her paper, "White Trash(ing): Spike as Site of Resistance," Tamzin Cook promised the audience that she was going to show clips of "Naked Spike." And sure enough, there he was, bigger than life on the screen in front of us, completely raw except for a blanket draped around his privates. Cook used this as an example of how Whedon's camera presents Spike in an inversion of what old-time feminist academic Laura Mulvey called "the male gaze." (Buffy appears in the same scene completely clothed and comparatively invulnerable.) If Mulvey's theory is tired and outmoded, Cook's fresh application of it wasn't.

Which is precisely the point: Most of us who live in the "real" working world have some pretty firm ideas about academics, some of them valid and some of them false. But maybe the whole point of what academics call "study" is to apply what you know to the world around you -- instead of trying to shape the world around what you already know. I still run into people who look at me quizzically when I tell them about the conference, as if the idea of a bunch of academics getting together to talk seriously about a TV show is nothing short of loony.

And maybe it is, a little. But so what? I can think of worse ways to spend a Saturday than in the company of a group of people who are so alive to the culture around them. They weren't even embarrassed to succumb to the lure of merchandising. Kulture Shock, a Norwich comic-book and sci-fi store, had set up a table with an assortment of Buffy figurines, books and cell-phone cases, and just about everyone had to at least have a look, even if they didn't buy anything.

At the end of the day, as everyone chatted and compared notes at a crowded wine reception, the news spread that Lavery and Wilcox had brought tapes of the first few episodes of Season 7 -- episodes that no one in the U.K. has yet seen, as the new season hasn't started there. On such short notice, the conference organizers couldn't find a room at the university in which to show the tapes, so the management at Kulture Shock offered to show them to conference attendees after the store had closed for the day.

The problem was, Kulture Shock couldn't accommodate all the people who wanted to see the tapes -- at least not at first. So its managers set up three separate screenings, running late into the night, so that everyone who wanted to could see the new episodes. And though I didn't go -- Americans who had already seen the episodes were asked to opt out, in order to make room for others -- I was immeasurably pleased by the idea of dozens of academics getting together to watch TV in a comic-book store.

Sure, there are plenty of "serious" academics who would accuse the "Buffy" fans of being too pop. But it's got to be sour grapes. In the world of academic research, Jacques Lacan or Jacques Derrida may have more clout than "Buffy." But no one wants to go to their pajama parties.

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