Jared Gardner used to race home from school to his Brooklyn neighborhood every day to catch the 4:30 p.m. movie on WPIX. He was obsessed with pop music, collected mountains of baseball cards and devoured science fiction novels and comics.

“I was a voracious consumer … of stuff,” said Gardner, an associate professor of English at Ohio State.

Now, instead of “stuff,” he calls them “texts.”

Besides teaching more traditional literary subjects, such as early American and African-American literature, Gardner has also been instrumental in designing the popular culture studies minor, and is a faculty member in the interdisciplinary film studies program.

“I’m not sure if I’m interesting, but I have the good fortune to teach lots of interesting classes and work with lots of interesting students,” he said as a lofty, life-size cut-out of Marilyn Monroe stood smiling over his desk.

His career has often been about breaking down the wall between “high culture, and the stuff we should be studying in the universities, and this other stuff that universities are supposed to keep out,” he said; things like movies, television and comics.

At OSU, he said he encounters less resistance and eye-rolling at some of his unconventional pursuits, such as classic Hollywood cinema and the history of American comics.

Gardner, who began teaching at OSU in 1999, said he relishes the opportunity to teach a variety of courses, from the standby of American literature, to the “Ivory Tower” upstarts of film and pop culture.

In fact, it took five years before he taught the same course again, he said.

“I’ve done all these different things, partly to fill needs of the department, partly to fill my own kind of intellectual desires and curiosities, and it’s never been a problem. They’ve always given me flexibility to try different things,” he explained.

One problem, though, is the array of misconceptions that many have about teaching and learning pop culture.

For instance, Gardner said, many students think pop culture classes will be easy. But Gardner said they pose their own unique challenges.

“Students can’t just kind of look at a few critical essays and borrow terms that literary critics, for example, have used for generations,” he said. Students have to come up with their own methods and vocabulary.

At heart, learning about popular culture, or what Gardner calls “the culture of everyday life,” allows students to make connections to more traditional areas of study.

Gardner said he likes to remind his students that the novel, that paragon of American “high culture” was considered the lowest of pop culture in the 1700s.

“It was often treated as being as dangerous and as scandalous and potentially corrupting as, let’s say, video games or rap music is today,” he said.

Gardner was born in Columbus to two OSU art graduate students. It wasn’t long, though, before the family packed up and moved to New York City.

Growing up in a mixed-race family and neighborhood in the economically lean 1970s opened his eyes to the divisions of race and the power of white privilege, he said. This would inform much of his later research, including a book about race and early American literature.

He left New York City behind for college. He received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College and did his graduate work at John Hopkins University.

He said he hadn’t cared for New York and decided to settle down to quiet small-town life instead. He began teaching at Grinnell College in Iowa in the mid-’90s.

However, he found he really didn’t like small towns either. Like Goldilocks discovering the perfect bed for napping, he found Columbus, and OSU, to be a perfect fit.

In December Gardner was awarded the Paul W. Brown Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching in English and History. In August, he was invited to write about film and pop culture for The Huffington Post, a popular left-of-center news blog.

Both are honors in their own way, and highlight his straddling of the academic and popular worlds.

His last blog on The Huffington Post was a critique of director James Cameron’s muddled anti-imperialist message in the hit film Avatar.

At first, Gardner thought blogging would get in the way of his more serious, academic writing. But he said that he felt that his outside writing (which he also does for The Short North Gazette and on his comic review Web siteguttergeek.com) actually made him a better writer and that writing has become easier.

“I began to become happier in my profession when I stopped making distinctions about what was worth studying and what wasn’t,” he said.

“I tried to put away childish things,” he said, “and they kept coming back.”