BOWLING GREEN, Ohio—Earlier this month, rock fans around the world descended on this college town, pumped up for four days of music, booze and headbanging.

Kids attending a rock festival? Not exactly. It was the International Conference on Heavy Metal and Popular Culture, the world's biggest gathering of scholars researching the loud, aggressive—and some say obnoxious—music called heavy metal.

For decades, parents, politicians and psychologists have blamed heavy metal for corrupting youth with violent and sexual messages. But a new generation of academics who grew up on groups like Britain's Black Sabbath—widely credited for siring the genre in the early 1970s—is raising metal's black flag in an unlikely place: academia's ivory tower.

These "metallectuals," as they call themselves, congregated at Bowling Green State University clad in black T-shirts with logos of their favorite bands and delivered PowerPoint presentations on topics like "Beyond Black: Satanism, Medievalism and the Dark Illumination of the Self in the Aesthetics of Norwegian and Transnational Black Metal." At night, they conducted field research in Bowling Green's rock clubs while smoking cigarettes and sipping craft beers.

"This is a great day for metal studies, and maybe even for metal," said Jeremy Wallach, 42 years old, an associate professor at BGSU whose research examines how metal is galvanizing youth around the globe the way rock 'n' roll inspired American baby boomers in the 1960s. "To be a metal-head in 2013 is to be part of a global community."