SPECIAL SERIES:

“Talking television IN A TIME OF CRISIS”

This is a special series on how we encounter, engage with, and teach Television Studies in the wake of multiple crises including the global pandemic and anti-discrimination protests.

Organized by Hunter Hargraves, Lynne Joyrich, and Brandy Monk-Payton, recorded and edited by Christine Becker,
and featuring:

Sarah Banet-Weiser  |  Miranda Banks | Josie Torres Barth  |  Christine Becker  |  Michelle Cho  |  Aymar Jean Christian  |  Joseph Clark  | Matt Delmont | Racquel Gates  |  Liz Giuffre  |  Herman Gray  |  Jonathan Gray | Hollis Griffin  |  Lisa Guerrero  |  Eva Hageman |  Bambi Haggins  |  Hannah Hamad | Amelie Hastie  |  Heather Hendershot |  Lauren Herold  |  Julia Himberg  |  Charlotte Howell | Darnell Hunt |  Victoria Johnson  |  Misha Kavka  |  Sarah Kessler  |   Amanda Ann Klein  |  Melanie E.S. Kohnen | Derek Kompare  |  Jorie Lagerwey | Kayti Lausch | Elana Levine  |  Yael Levy  |  Jinying Li  |  Juan Llamas-Rodriguez  |  Daniel Marcus | Alfred L. Martin Jr. | Myles McNutt  |  Quinn Miller | Taylor Cole Miller  |  Jason Mittell  |  Rahul Mukherjee | Roopali Mukherjee | Linde Murugan  |  Eve Ng | Taylor Nygaard | Susan Ohmer | Laurie Ouellette  |  Andrew Owens  |  Lisa Parks  |  Alisa Perren | Melissa Phruksachart | Isabel Pinedo  |  Swapnil Rai | Yoruba Richen | Julie Levin Russo  |  Nick Salvato  |  Jeff Scheible  |  Suzanne Scott  |  Sharon Shahaf  |  Samantha N. Sheppard | Francesca Sobande  |  Mel Stanfill | Karen Tongson  |  Amy Villarejo  |  Rebecca Wanzo | Kristen Warner | Brenda R. Weber | Khadijah Costley White | Mimi White | Jacinta Yanders

Have a question that you want the podcast to address? Please email us at talkingtelevisioninapandemic@gmail.com or use the hashtag #talktvinapandemic on Twitter. You can also join and submit questions to the Aca-Media group on Facebook.

Subscribe to the Aca-Media feed to make sure you don’t miss an episode!

SEASON 2: “TALKING TELEVISION IN A TIME OF CRISIS”

Our special series continues with further conversations about studying and making sense of television in extraordinary times. Beginning in November, 2020, just after the election of Joe Biden over Donald Trump, we host conversations among leading media scholars in an effort to make sense of how to teach, research, and live with television in a time of crisis.

Our special series “Talking Television” is back for a second season! In this episode we discuss how television manages, amplifies, and contains our collective anxieties about the election and about other political issues, and we ask: How can we best use television to promote democratic aims?

Host: Sarah Kessler (University of Southern California)
Guest Scholars:  Matt Delmont (Dartmouth College), Sarah Kessler (University of Southern California), Kayti Lausch (University of Michigan), Roopali Mukherjee (Queens College), Susan Ohmer (University of Notre Dame)
Theme music and final production: Todd Thompson
Original release date: Nov. 24, 2020

In this second episode of season two of “Talking Television in a Crisis,” we discuss tactics: How can we best analyze and address the power of television, particularly in times of crisis and controversy? How might we define a televisual activism—or is that a contradiction in terms?

Host: Samantha Sheppard (Cornell University)
Guest Scholars: Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin—Madison); Daniel Marcus (Goucher College); Quinn Miller (University of Oregon); Eve Ng (Ohio University); Samantha Sheppard (Cornell University)
Theme music and final production: Todd Thompson
Original release date: Dec. 28, 2020

Host: Miranda Banks (Loyola Marymount University)
Guest Scholars: Sarah Banet-Weiser (London School of Economics), Miranda Banks (Loyola Marymount University), Melanie Kohnen (Lewis and Clark College), Al Martin (University of Iowa), and Alisa Perren (University of Texas, Austin)
Theme music and final production: Todd Thompson
Original release date: Jan. 07, 2021

This episode is dedicated to the late Jane Feuer. Find out how to donate to the “Jane Feuer Graduate Student Award” here.

Host: Mimi White (Northwestern University)
Guest Scholars: Eva Hageman (University of Maryland College Park), Darnell Hunt (UCLA), Melissa Phruksachart (University of Michigan), Brenda Weber (Indiana University)
Theme music and final production: Todd Thompson
Original release date: Feb. 16, 2021

Host: Nick Salvato (Cornell University)
Guest Scholars: Josie Torres Barth (North Carolina State University), Elana Levine (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee), Yael Levy, (Northwestern University), Jason Mittell (Middlebury College), Isabel Pinedo (Hunter College/CUNY)
Theme music and final production: Todd Thompson
Original release date: Apr. 15, 2021

Host: Swapnil Rai (University of Michigan)
Guest Scholars: Hannah Hamad (Cardiff University), Charlotte Howell (Boston University), Rahul Muhkerjee (University of Pennsylvania), Swapnil Rai (University of Michigan), Mel Stanfill (University of Central Florida)
Theme music and final production: Todd Thompson
Original release date: May. 31, 2021

Host: Taylor Nygaard (Arizona State University)
Guest Scholars: Heather Hendershot (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Jorie Lagerwey (University College Dublin), Taylor Nygaard (Arizona State University), Yoruba Richen (Documentarian), Rebecca Wanzo (Washington University in St. Louis), Khadijah Costley White (Rutgers University)
Theme music and final production: Todd Thompson
Original release date: June 24, 2021

Host: Joseph Clark (Simon Fraser University)
Guest Scholars: Lisa Guerrero (Washington State University), Lauren Herold (Beloit College), Victoria Johnson (University of California—Irvine), Andrew Owens (University of Iowa), Sharon Shahaf (Academic Writers Unblock)
Theme music and final production: Todd Thompson
Original release date: July 22, 2021

Participants: Christine Becker, Hunter Hargraves, Lynne Joyrich, and Brandy Monk-Payton
Theme music and final production: Todd Thompson
Original release date: Aug. 16, 2021

SEASON 1: “TALKING TELEVISION IN A PANDEMIC”

These are times when more and more people are tuning into television-across all of its forms, from network to streaming TV-for news and information, comfort and company, narrative pleasure and imaginative stimulation. It is thus a particularly valuable time to think through pressing questions of television and television studies. "Talking Television in a Pandemic" is a five-episode podcast series (plus introduction) featuring scholars who will explore issues of epistemology, ideology, phenomenology, technology, and pedagogy in TV and TV Studies: how we are watching and feeling during these times, how TV is changing technologically and politically, how we think through TV and how we teach it.

Some episodes of this series were recorded before the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020—when a white police officer pressed his knee to Floyd's neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds while Floyd struggled for his life—and before the protests that broke out around the country and the world condemning that despicable murder and, more broadly, police brutality and systemic racial injustice. Racism too is a pandemic—one that intersects with the COVID-19 pandemic, with African Americans at higher risk of the Coronavirus because of centuries of health, employment, and social disparities. The horrific inequalities in the economic and criminal "justice" systems—and, of course, in the media—highlight how racism itself poses an ongoing public health crisis. In the wake of this murder—along with the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others—we have thus broadened the podcast conversations to include discussion of television's relation to racism, injustice, oppressive policing and policies (and the protests against these) together with discussion of television's relation to COVID-19, as considering these pandemics together is, we believe, critical to understanding the state of our world and the media today.

This introduction to the series “Talking Television in a Pandemic” was part of Aca-Media’s Episode 54. Brandy, Hunter, and Lynne discuss the origins and goals of the series, as well as what you can expect in each episode.

In this episode, we discuss television and epistemology in a global pandemic: How do we know TV and how do we know through TV? What are the implications of people tuning in more and more to TV to attempt to gain knowledge (and cope with that knowledge) of the pandemic? What sorts of knowledges (or ignorances) might emerge, in various ways, from various genres on TV—not only news/documentary/public affairs but drama, comedy, fantasy, reality programming, etc.? What are the power effects of TV's production of knowledge and ignorance? How can we attempt to know television without just reproducing its own strategies, power dynamics, and blindspots?

Guest scholars: Herman Gray, Amelie Hastie, Taylor Cole Miller, Laurie Ouellette.
Host: Lynne Joyrich. For more on the participants, see below.
Theme music and final production: Todd Thompson.
Original release date: May 25, 2020

What are the relations between televisual politics and aesthetics, identity and representation, communication and critique? How has the pandemic renewed interest in conversations around TV’s modes of address and how viewers make meaning from particular kinds of programming content? At a time when fraught politics are, one might say, on the very surface of texts today, how should we best deploy and/or aim to transform ideological analysis? This episode includes a special discussion of ideology in relation to the protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Guest scholars: Racquel Gates, Amanda Ann Klein, Juan Llamas Rodriguez, Amy Villarejo
Host: Brandy Monk-Payton
Special conversation on the protests: Brandy Monk-Payton, Hunter Hargraves, and Lynne Joyrich
Theme music and final production: Todd Thompson
Original release date: June 2, 2020

What are the primary affects around and through TV consumption? How has the pandemic (and the protests following the murder of George Floyd) affected the ways in which we consume and critique television? What are our embodied viewing experiences as audiences trapped at home, and how might these experiences speak to new ways of perceiving and understanding TV? What can we learn from existing fan cultures about spectatorial engagement in this time? How has the pandemic affected our collective notions of comfort and discomfort, and how does this shake out across modes of distribution, genre, and style?

Guest scholars: Hollis Griffin, Suzanne Scott, Karen Tongson, Kristen Warner
Host: Hunter Hargraves
Theme music and final production: Todd Thompson
Original release date: June 8, 2020

How are old and new technologies impacting TV production, textuality, and reception? What possibilities are emerging, and what might be closing down? How does this impact media industries and/or media audiences? How do discourses of technology overlap and interact with discourses around the pandemic, and what might we make of that? In other words, how does the idea of “virality” resonate with televisual/video technologies in all of their forms?

Guest Scholars: AJ Christian, Myles McNutt, Linde Murugan, Lisa Parks
Host: Michelle Cho
Theme music and final production: Todd Thompson
Original release date: June 15, 2020

How do we teach TV today? What issues are emerging at this moment in the classroom? How has the virtualization of everyday life shifted the ways in which we reflect on and teach media? What can we do to support the mental and physical health of our students and colleagues, and how might that tie to media themselves? What can we do to ensure that our discipline is supported by university administrators in a time of so much uncertainty about the future of higher education?

Guest scholars: Bambi Haggins, Julia Himberg, Derek Kompare, Jacinta Yanders
Host: Julie Levin Russo
Theme music and final production: Todd Thompson
Original release date: June 22, 2020

Our special series “Talking Television in a Pandemic” continues with a bonus sixth episode! What can non-North American perspectives teach us about television’s negotiation between the local and the global, both during the global pandemic and amidst global protest movements for liberation and racial justice?

Guest scholars: Chris Becker, Liz Giuffre, Misha Kavka, Jinying Li, Jeff Scheible, and Francesca Sobande
Theme music and final production: Todd Thompson
Original release date: July 13, 2020

The organizers of the ”Talking Television in a Pandemic" series reflect on the previous six episodes and what we should take away from these conversations.

Speakers: Hunter Hargraves, Lynne Joyrich, and Brandy Monk-Payton
Theme music and final production: Todd Thompson
Original release date: July 20, 2020

hosts and producers

Logo designed by Julie Russo and Melissa Getreu with open license images.
Theme music and final production by Todd Thompson.
”Talking Television” is supported by the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies and the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.

Participants/guest scholars:

Sarah Banet-Weiser is Professor and Head of Department in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. She is the author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (1999), Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (2007), Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (2012), and Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (2018). She is the co-editor of Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (2007), Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (2012), and Racism PostRace (2019), and has published in journals such as Social Media and Society, International Journal of Communication, American Quarterly, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Feminist Theory, and Cultural Studies.

Miranda Banks is Associate Professor of Film, Television, and Media Studies at Loyola Marymount University’s School of Film and Television. Her primary area of research is the American film and television industries, with a specific focus on power dynamics in creative production. She authored The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (Rutgers 2015) and co-edited the collections Production Studies (Routledge, 2009) and Production Studies, The Sequel (Routledge, 2015).

Josie Torres Barth is a teaching assistant professor of film studies at North Carolina State University, where she teaches courses in film history and analysis, TV studies, and horror across media. Her research examines how forms of audience address in television, film, and radio demonstrate changing conceptions of public and private spheres, with a focus on anxieties surrounding the ambiguous position of women in the growing consumer economy of the postwar United States. Her work has appeared in Camera Obscura and is forthcoming in Contemporary American Prestige Television: Cultural and Artistic Value in the Multiplatform Era (Rutgers UP).

Christine Becker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame specializing in film and television history and critical analysis. Her book It’s the Pictures That Got Small: Hollywood Film Stars on 1950s Television (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) won an IAMHIST Michael Nelson Prize for a Work in Media and History. She has recently published anthology chapters about British actors on American television, BBC America’s corporate strategies, and television programming during the American Bicentennial. She also co-hosts and co-produces the Aca-Media podcast for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. 

Michelle Cho is Assistant Professor of East Asian Popular Culture at the University of Toronto. She's published on Asian cinemas in Cinema Journal, The Korean Popular Culture Reader,and Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinemas. Her research on Korean wave television, video, and pop music appears in Asian Video Cultures, Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media, and The International Journal of Communication. Her first monograph analyzes millennial South Korean genre cinemas, and her current project theorizes “vicarious media” in the convergence of platforms, affect, and the globalization fantasies characteristic of K-pop and its fandoms.

Aymar Jean Christian is a scholar, media producer, and social practice artist exploring the convergence of television, video art, and creative research and development. He is Associate Professor of Communication at Northwestern University and the author of Open TV: Innovation Beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television (NYU Press, 2018), as well as articles in academic journals such as International Journal of Communication, Continuum, andTransformative Works & Culture. He is also the founder of  OTV | Open Television, a platform Chicago-based intersectional television that produces and exhibits indie TV and video art both online and in Chicago. 

Joseph Clark is a Co-Chair of the SCMS Precarious Labor Organization. He is a part-time lecturer in film studies at Simon Fraser University and sessional instructor at the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr University of Art and Design. His research and teaching focus on archival and non-theatrical media, including newsreels, home movies, and sponsored film. He is the author of News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). He is a member of the DOXA Documentary Film Festival Programming Committee and the organizing committee of the Vancouver Podcast Festival.

Matthew Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. His work on television history includes Making Roots: A Nation Captivated (University of California Press, 2016); Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (UC Press, 2016); and Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia (UC Press, 2012). In addition to these books, he has published articles on television history in Camera Obscura, Southern Spaces, and the Journal of Urban History.

Racquel Gates is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. Her research focuses on blackness and popular culture, with special attention to discourses of taste and quality. She is the author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke, 2018). Her work appears in both academic as well as popular publications, some of which include The New York Times, The Root, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Film Quarterly, Television & New Media, as well as other journals and collections.

Liz Giuffre is a Senior Lecturer in Communication for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Her work covers television from a variety of angles including broadcast and post-broadcast, as well as specialist types of “ordinary” television like children's, music and comedy television. She is also an arts journalist and commentator, with work appearing in Metro Magazine, Critical Studies in Television, The Conversation, TheMusic.com.au and ABC Australia radio and online.  She is also the co-founder of the Journal of Working-Class Studies (with Dr. Sarah Attfield). 

Herman Gray is Emeritus Professor Gray of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz where he taught courses in media and television studies, cultural theory and politics, and Black cultural studies.  Gray has published widely in scholarly journals like American Quarterly, International Journal of Communication, Cultural Studies, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and Television and New Media in the areas of black cultural politics, media, and television studies.  His books on jazz, television, and black cultural politics include Producing Jazz, Watching Race, and Cultural Moves.  He co-edited Toward a Sociology of the Trace with Macarena Gomez Barris and The Sage Handbook of Television Studies with Toby Miller and Milly Buonanno.  His most recent book is co-edited with Sarah Banet Weiser and Roopali Mukherjee called Racism Post Race published by Duke UP.

Jonathan Gray is Hamel Family Distinguished Chair in Communication Arts at University of Wisconsin - Madison. He is Chief Editor of International Journal of Cultural Studies and of NYU Press’ Critical Cultural Communication series, and author of Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality, Television Entertainment, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, Television Studies (with Amanda D. Lotz), and soon Television Goes to the Movies (with Derek Johnson) and Dislike-Minded: Media, Audiences, and the Dynamics of Taste. He has co-edited numerous books, including most recently Keywords for Media Studies (with Laurie Ouellette) and Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World’s second edition (with Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington).

Hollis Griffin is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Denison University and the author of the book, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age (Indiana, 2017), which was named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2017 by Choice, the publication of the American Library Association. He is Associate Editor for the journal Communication, Culture, & Critique and sits on the Board of Directors for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, where he serves as Secretary. His teaching and research interests include television, new media, and cultural politics, particularly as they intersect with questions of affect, sexuality, and space/place.

Lisa Guerrero is Associate Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusive Excellence and professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State University. She is the author of Crazy Funny: Popular Black Satire and the Method of Madness (Routledge, 2020). She is co-author with David J. Leonard of African Americans in Television (Praeger, 2013) and the editor of Teaching Race in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). She has published essays on: Black “Chick Lit,” the Bratz dolls, Lebron James, Michelle Obama, Black satire and postmodernism, and the works of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kiese Laymon.

Eva Hageman is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies and the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research and teaching focus on race, gender, and media production. Her book manuscript, “‘Relatable Meets Remarkable’: Crafting Race in the Reality Television Industry,” examines the central role reality television plays in shaping articulations of race in the 21st century. In 2019, her writing was included in the collection Racism Postrace (Duke) and her video essay shiplap was screened at the Black Film Center Archive at Indiana University. She has directed two documentaries, Legendary (2010) and You, As Seen on TV (2011).

Bambi Haggins is Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine. Her work explores race, class, gender and sexuality in American comedy across media. Her first book, Laughing Mad, was awarded the Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award. Her work has been published in Cinema Journal, Framework, Ms., and The New York Times as well as several edited collections. Haggins wrote Showtime's Why We Laugh: Funny Women and was historical consultant/onscreen talent for HBO’s Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley (both 2013). Haggins is currently editing “TV Memories: Letters to Our Televisual Past,” in which scholars reflect upon their personal viewer experiences and beginning a project about comedy, Black culture and reception in Las Dias de Rona.

Hannah Hamad is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Cardiff University, School of Journalism, Media and Culture. She is the author of Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film: Framing Fatherhood (New York and London: Routledge, 2014) and her second book Film, Feminism and Rape Culture in the Yorkshire Ripper Years is forthcoming (London: BFI Publishing/Bloomsbury, 2023). Hannah is a member of the editorial collective for Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, and she is the co-founder and co-coordinator (with Anthea Taylor of the University of Sydney) of the international Feminist Celebrity Studies Research Network. 

Amelie Hastie is founding Chair of the Film and Media Studies Program and Professor of English at Amherst College. Her first two books — Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollectionand Film History from Duke UP and the BFI Film Classics volume on The Bigamist— are committed to explorations of women’s authorship in and of film history.  She is currently finishing a book on the television series Columbo (Duke UP) and starting a second BFI volume on Klute.  She has edited special issues of Film History on women during the silent era and of journal of visual culture and Vectors on materiality and the moving image. She wrote “The Vulnerable Spectator” column in Film Quarterly from 2013-2019 and was a proud member of the Camera Obscura editorial collective for over a decade.

Heather Hendershot is professor of film and media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research centers on conservative and right-wing media, and her most recent books are What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest and Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line. She is currently completing a book on network television coverage of the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Heather is a former editor of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and she has held fellowships at Princeton, NYU, Harvard, Vassar, Penn, and Stanford, and has also been a Guggenheim fellow.

Lauren Herold is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Critical Identity Studies at Beloit College and received her PhD in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University's Radio/Television/Film department. Her work explores LGBTQ television history in relation to oral history, media activism, affect theory, and production studies. Her dissertation “Cable Comes Out: LGBTQ Community Television on New York Cable Access Stations” argues that public access cable TV created by and for LGBTQ people reflected and amplified particular affects and experiences circulating in queer communities between the 1970s-2000s. Her work also appears in Television & New Media and Jump Cut.

Julia Himberg is Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies at Arizona State University where she teaches courses including Television and Cultural Studies and LGBTV: Television and Sexuality. She is the author of The New Gay for Pay: The Sexual Politics of American Television Production and her work has appeared in journals such as Communication, Culture, & Critique, Television & New Media, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. She is currently the Online Editor for JCMS.

Charlotte E. Howell is an Assistant Professor of Television and Media Studies in the Department of Film and Television at Boston University. She has published work in Critical Studies in Television, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (formerly Cinema Journal), and Kinephanos. Her first book, Divine Programming (Oxford, 2020) is out now.

Darnell Hunt is Dean of the Division of Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at UCLA. He is the author of Screening the Los Angeles "Riots": Race, Seeing and Resistance, of O.J. Simpson Facts and Fictions: News Rituals in the Construction of Reality and of numerous scholarly and popular magazine articles, and editor of Channeling Blackness: Studies on Television and Race in America and Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities. He was lead author of UCLA’s 2014-2020 Hollywood Diversity Reports; authored the last six installments of the Hollywood Writers Report; and was principal investigator of The African American Television Report (2000). He has worked as a consultant on film and television projects, been widely interviewed, and participated in numerous panel discussions and hearings about media diversity sponsored by such entities as the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the Federal Communications Commission, the United Nations, and the Congressional Black Caucus.

Victoria E. Johnson is Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies and the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on U.S. television history, the media industries and sports media through the lenses of cultural geography, and critical race theory. Her books include Sports TV (Routledge, 2021) and Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity (NYU Press, 2008) which received the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Katherine Singer Kovács Book Prize in 2009. Her work has been published in journals and collections including Film Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Racism Postrace (Duke, 2019), and How to Watch Television: Media Criticism in Practice (NYU Press, 2013). She is an Associate Editor of Television and New Media and co-editor of the University of Illinois Press series, “Studies in Sports Media.” In July, she becomes President-Elect of SCMS (2021-2023).

Misha Kavka is Professor of Cross-Media Culture at the University of Amsterdam. She has published widely on gender, celebrity and affect in relation to television, film and media technologies. She is the author of Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy (2008) and Reality TV (2012), and the co-editor of volumes on transnational reality television, gothic culture and feminist theory.

Sarah Kessler is a media scholar and television critic. Her articles and essays have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, In These Times, Theory and Event, Triple Canopy, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her book-in-progress, Anachronism Effects, examines the politics of voice and ventriloquism in transatlantic popular culture. Kessler is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California and the TV section editor at Public Books.

Amanda Ann Klein is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the English Department at East Carolina University. She is the author of American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, & Defining Subcultures (University of Texas Press, 2011) and co-editor of Multiplicities: Cycles, Sequels, Remakes and Reboots in Film & Television (University of Texas Press, 2016). Her new book, Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV’s Transition to Reality Programming is forthcoming from Duke University Press in January 2021. Her scholarship has also appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Jump Cut, Film Criticism, Flow, Antenna, Salon, The Atlantic, Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and The New Yorker.

Melanie E.S. Kohnen is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies at Lewis & Clark College. Her research examines interactions between the TV industry and audiences that negotiate media access, diversity, and distribution on social media and at conventions. She currently investigates experiential marketing at San Diego Comic-Con as key site for understanding tensions between Hollywood and fandom in the context of life in brand cultures. In addition to publishing in journals like the International Journal of Cultural Studies, she also shares her work in video essays and digital storytelling.

Derek Kompare is an Associate Professor and Chair of Film and Media Arts at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (2005) and CSI (2010), and co-editor of Making Media Work: Cultures of Management in the Entertainment Industries (2014), and has published several articles and chapters on television form and history. At SMU, he teaches courses on media industries, history, and fandom.

Jorie Lagerwey is Associate Professor in Television Studies in the School of English Drama and Film, University College Dublin. She teaches and writes about race, class, and gender and the ways in which genre, aesthetics, and industry practices create the cultural and representational realities on television. She is the author, with Taylor Nygaard, of Horrible White People: Gender, Genre, and Television’s Precarious Whiteness (NYU Press, 2020), and co-editor with Katherine Fama of Single Lives: Independent Women in Literature and Popular Culture (Rutgers UP, 2022). She is also the author of Postfeminist Celebrity and Motherhood: Brand Mom (Routledge 2016) and numerous articles.

Kayti Lausch recently received her PhD in Film, Television, and Media from the University of Michigan. Her research investigates the connections between identity, media industries, Christianity, and American culture and politics. Her dissertation, “Building a Climate of Righteousness: Religious Television Networks in American Culture,” explores how evangelical television networks reshaped US culture and politics by creating a new demographic of “Christian” or “family” viewers and encouraging them to define themselves in opposition to the mainstream. Her work has been published in Television & New Media and Flow.

Elana Levine is professor of Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History (Duke, 2020) and Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television (Duke, 2007), co-author of Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (Routledge, 2012), editor of Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early 21st Century (Illinois, 2015), and co-editor of Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Duke, 2007).

Yael Levy is a postdoctoral scholar at Northwestern University’s Screen Cultures Program and a teaching fellow at the Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University. Her work on gender, race, sexuality, and textuality in US television has appeared in Feminist Media Studies and Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, among others, and her coedited anthology (with Miri Talmon) Israeli Television: Local Visions, Global Contexts was published by Routledge in 2020. Her book Chick TV: Antiheroines and Time Unbound is forthcoming from Syracuse University Press in 2021.

Jinying Li is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She focuses her teaching and research on media theory, animation, and digital culture in East Asia. Her essays have been published in Film International, Mechademia, the International Journal of Communication, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Asiascape, Asian Cinema, and Camera Obscura. She co-edited two special issues on Chinese animation for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and a special issue on regional platforms for Asiascape: Digital Asia. She recently completed her first book, Geek Pleasures: Anime, Otaku, and Cybernetic Affect, and began her second book project, Walled Media and Mediating Walls. Jinying is also a filmmaker and has produced two documentary TV series that were broadcasted nationwide in China through Shanghai Media Group (SMG). She is one of the co-writers of animated feature film Big Fish and Begonia (Dayu Haitang, 2016).

Juan Llamas-Rodriguez is assistant professor of critical media studies in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at the University of Texas at Dallas. His areas of specialization include digital media, border studies, infrastructure studies, and Latin American film and television. His writing has appeared in Feminist Media Histories, Flow, Television and New Media, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, among others. He is a member of the Global Internet TV Consortium, a network of media studies scholars seeking to understand the implications of internet-distributed television around the world. 

Daniel Marcus is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the author of Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics (2004), editor of ROAR! The Paper Tiger Television Guide to Media Activism (1991), and co-editor of Contemporary Documentary (2016). His recent publications are on research methods in the study of non-fiction media; documentaries and the 2008 financial crisis; and cross-cultural collaboration in activist media projects. He has participated in Paper Tiger Television, the Deep Dish TV Satellite Network, and the Memefest network for political design, media, and communication.

Alfred L. Martin Jr. is assistant professor of media studies at University of Iowa. Martin’s research is concerned with the complex interplay between media industry studies and audience/fandom studies as related to television and film studies, critical black studies, sexuality and gender studies. He is author of The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom (Indiana University Press, 2021) and has published in scholarly journals including International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Communication, Culture & Critique, Feminist Media Studies, Popular Communication, and Television and New Media.

Myles McNutt is Assistant Professor of Communication and Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, where he researches and teaches about the media industries. In addition to formal scholarly publishing in Television and New Media, Communication, Culture, and Critique, and Media Industries Journal, among others, his public scholarship can be found at The A.V. Club, Slate, and his personal blog, Cultural Learnings. His first monograph, Television's Spatial Capital: Location, Relocation, Dislocation, is under contract with Routledge. 

Quinn Miller is an Associate Professor specializing in queer media studies in the Department of English at the University of Oregon, where he teaches material culture, queer methods, and trans subjects—in television studies courses, in a genre course on blurbs, and in courses on form, on topics such as versatility. He is the author of Camp TV: Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History (Duke, 2019). Recent writing appears in Aesthetics for Birds.

Taylor Cole Miller is Academic Director of the Peabody Awards Media Center and Assistant Professor of Entertainment and Media Studies at the University of Georgia where he teaches courses in television histories, criticism, and telecommunications policy. His research focuses on queer and feminist television histories. He is currently working on a monograph about the queer potential that television syndication has offered audiences through the years as well as a co-edited book on The Golden Girls and fandom. You can find his work in Television & New Media, Flow, and several anthologies including Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination, Queer in the Choir Room, and How to Watch TV. 

Jason Mittell is Professor and Chair of Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College. His books include Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (NYU Press, 2015), The Videographic Essay: Practice & Pedagogy (with Christian Keathley & Catherine Grant, videographicessay.org, 2019), Narrative Theory and Adaptation. (Bloomsbury, 2017), and How to Watch Television (co-edited with Ethan Thompson; NYU Press, 2013; revised edition 2020). He is the co-founder and project manager for [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, co-director of the NEH-supported workshop series Scholarship in Sound & Image, and author of numerous video essays.

Rahul Mukherjee is Associate Professor of Television and New Media Studies at University of Pennsylvania. His research on environmental media and mobile phone cultures has been published in his recent monograph Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (Duke University Press, 2020) and in journals such as Media, Culture, and Society and Asiascape: Digital Asia. He is an editor for Journal of Visual Culture.

Roopali Mukherjee is Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, CUNY. She is a critical race scholar of media and US public culture. Mukherjee is the author of The Blacking Factory: Brand Culture and the Technologies of the Racial Self (University of Minnesota Press, in press) and The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the ‘Post-Soul’ Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). She is also co-editor of Racism Postrace (Duke University Press, 2019) and Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (NYU Press, 2012).

Meenasarani Linde Murugan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. Her research focuses on television and theories of race and diaspora. She has written on Asian diasporic pop culture for the Los Angeles Review of Booksand The Platform. Her book, Gender and Race in Postwar Variety Television: Colorful Performance, is under contract at Routledge. She was a 2019 Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Career Enhancement Fellow. 

Eve Ng is an Associate Professor in the School of Media Arts and Studies and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Ohio University. Her research on LGBTQ media, social media and participatory practices, and LGBTQ activism has been published in journals such as Communication, Culture, & Critique, Development and Change, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Film and Video, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Popular Communication, Television and New Media, and Transformative Works and Culture. She is an Associate Editor for Communication, Culture, & Critique, on the editorial board of Transformative Works and Cultures, and serves on the International Communication Association’s Strategic Planning Committee.

Taylor Nygaard is an adjunct instructor in film and media studies at Arizona State University. She holds a M.A. & Ph.D. in Film and Television from the University of Southern California, and a B.A. from UC Berkeley in Rhetoric and Film Studies. She is co-author of Horrible White People: Gender, Genre, & Television's Precarious Whiteness (NYU Press, 2020). Her research and teaching focuses on contemporary representations of gender, race, and class in media and pop culture, paying particular interest to emerging media industry trends. Her academic work has been published in Feminist Media Studies, Television and New Media, and several anthologies. She's based in Colorado Springs, CO where she is on the programming committee for the Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Festival and also works as a freelance story producer.

Susan Ohmer is the William T. and Helen Kuhn Carey Associate Professor of Modern Communication in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, where she regularly teaches a class on “Media and Presidential Elections.” Her research focuses on the industrial and organizational aspects of media firms and has appeared in journals including Film History and the Quarterly Review of Film and Video and in the anthologies Funny Pictures and Hollywood and American Cinema of the 1930s. She is the author of George Gallup in Hollywood (Columbia University Press, 2006) and is completing a book on the Disney studio for Routledge.

Laurie Ouellette is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota, where she is also Chair of the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. She has been writing about television since the 1990s, with a focus on the medium's relationship to technologies of governance, everyday pedagogy, self-representation and cultural regulation. She is the author of Viewers Like You? How Public Television Failed the People (2002), co-author of Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship (2008), co-editor of Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (2009) and Keywords for Media Studies (2016) and editor of The Media Studies Reader (2012) and A Companion to Reality Television (2014). Her research has appeared in such journals as European Journal of Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies,Television & New Media, Cinema Journal, and Continuum:Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.    

Andrew J. Owens is a Lecturer in the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa. His research and teaching interests include media historiography, LGBTQ+/critical race theories, genre studies, and media industry studies. His first book, Desire After Dark: Contemporary Queer Cultures and Occultly Marvelous Media (Indiana University Press, 2021), constructs a cultural and industrial history of queer occult media from the 1960s to the present. 

Lisa Parks is Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, and is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. Parks is the author of Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (2018), Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (2005), and is co-editor of Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (2017), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (2015), and Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (2012). She is Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab. 

Alisa Perren is Associate Professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and Co-Director of the Center for Entertainment and Media Industries at The University of Texas at Austin. She is author of Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s (2012), co-author of The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood (forthcoming, 2021), co-editor of Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (2009), and co-founder and editorial collective member of the journal Media Industries.

Melissa Phruksachart is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan. Her book manuscript in progress, Playing Asian: Enfiguring the Model Minority on Cold War U.S. Television, writes a pre-history of the Asian American model minority racial formation as it emerged on early Cold War U.S. television. She also writes and teaches on women of color and transnational feminist cinemas; American television; and the political economy of diversity & multiculturalism within progressive spaces. Her essays can be found in Amerasia Journal, Film Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Studies, and Feminist Teacher.

Isabel Pinedo is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. She is the author of Difficult Women on Television Drama: The Gender Politics of Complex Women in Serial Narratives (Routledge), Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (SUNY UP), and articles on television and the horror film in such journals as Television and New Media, Journal of Popular Television, and Jump Cut, and such books as Final Girls, Feminism and Popular Culture, and A Companion to the Horror Film. She is currently co-editing a book on Camp TV of the 1960s: Reassessing the Vast Wasteland.

Swapnil Rai is Assistant Professor of Film, TV, and Media at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Swapnil’s research is concerned with the intersections of politics, popular culture, and media industries and brings together global media industry studies, transnational stardom, audience studies , and women and gender studies. Her work has been published in a range of scholarly journals including Communication, Culture & Critique, Feminist Media Studies, International Journal of Communication, Jump Cut, and Cinephile.

Yoruba Richen is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has been featured on PBS, MSNBC, FX, New York Times Op Doc, Frontline, The Atlantic and Field of Vision. Her latest film, How it Feels To Be Free premiered on PBS’s American Masters in January of 2021. Her other recent films include, The New York Times Presents: The Killing of Breonna Taylor currently streaming on Hulu and The Sit In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show which is streaming on Peacock. Her previous film, The Green Book: Guide to Freedom was broadcast on the Smithsonian Channel and was nominated for an EMMY. Her films, The New Black and Promised Land won multiple festival awards before airing on PBS's Independent Lens and P.O.V. Yoruba won the Creative Promise Award at Tribeca All Access and is a Sundance Producers Fellow. She is the 2016 recipient of the Chicken & Egg Breakthrough Filmmaker Award and a Guggenheim Fellow. Yoruba is the founding director of the Documentary Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Julie Levin Russo is a faculty member at The Evergreen State College, where she teaches interdisciplinary media studies and media arts programs. She is currently revising a book manuscript entitled Indiscrete Media: Queering Convergence Through Lesbian Fandom, and her work overall explores the collisions between media convergence, fan production, and remix culture and their reverberations within queer female fan practices. She has published numerous articles and chapters on related topics, including co-editing special issues of Transformative Works and Cultures on Fan/Remix Video (2012) and Queer Female Fandom (2017). 

Nick Salvato is Professor and Chair of the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University, where he teaches at the intersection of media studies and performance studies. He is the author of the five books Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance (Yale UP, 2010), Knots Landing (Wayne State UP, 2015), Obstruction (Duke UP 2016), and Television Scales (punctum books, 2019), as well as numerous articles that have appeared in such journals as Camera Obscura, Critical Inquiry, and Discourse. He is currently embarking on a fifth book project, tentatively titled, Soft: Television Aesthetics in the Long 1980s.

Jeff Scheible is a Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College London. His book Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation was published in 2015, and with Karen Redrobe he is the co-editor of the forthcoming collection Deep Mediations, both with University of Minnesota Press. His writing can also be found in World Records Journal, The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk, Film Quarterly, American Literature, and various other books and journals.

Suzanne Scott is an Assistant Professor of media studies in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry (NYU Press, 2019) and the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (Routledge, 2018). Her work has appeared in the journals Transformative Works and Cultures, Cinema Journal, New Media & Society, Participations, Feminist Media Histories, and Critical Studies in Media Communication as well as numerous anthologies, including Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (2nd Edition), How to Watch Television, The Participatory Culture Handbook, and Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica.

Sharon Shahaf (PhD, UT Austin) is a global media scholar, author, and writing coach, specializing in academic writing. She is the founder of Academic Writers Unblock! a writing consultancy offering workshops, private coaching, a vibrant, free, Facebook community and a popular YouTube channel. Dr. Shahaf has taught at Tel Aviv University, Georgia State University, and the University of Texas, Austin. Her scholarly work was published in journals like Critical Studies in Television, The Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture and Creative Industries Journal. Her co-edited anthology, Global Television Formats: Understanding Television across Borders (Routledge, 2012) won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Best Edited Collection Award for 2013. She is currently writing a writing guide for academic writers dealing with the taboo topic of the Academic Writer's Block. This project offers career academics practical advice to support them in developing a successful writing practice that's sustainable, self-compassionate and joyful!

Samantha N. Sheppard is the Mary Armstrong Meduski ’80 Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. She is the author of Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen (University of California Press, 2020) and coeditor of Sporting Realities: Critical Readings on the Sports Documentary (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) and From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (University Press of Mississippi, 2016). Her writing can be found in a range of academic and popular venues such as Film Quarterly, Black Camera, The Atlantic, and Flash Art International.

Francesca Sobande is a Lecturer in Digital Media Studies at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University. Her work focuses on issues related to race, gender, structural inequalities, media and the marketplace. Francesca's work has been published in journals including European Journal of Cultural Studies, Consumption, Markets & Culture, Celebrity Studies, Critical Studies in Television, and Communication, Culture & Critique. She is author of The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and is co-editor, with Akwugo Emejulu, of To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (Pluto Press, 2019).

Mel Stanfill is assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Texts and Technology Program and the Department of English at the University of Central Florida. Stanfill’s work examines social media, whiteness, interfaces, media industries, fan studies, and queer theory, and has appeared in New Media and Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Cinema Journal, Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans (Iowa, 2019) and A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy (with Anastasia Salter, Mississippi, 2020).

Karen Tongson is the author of Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2019), and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011). In 2019, she received the Lambda Literary Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction. She is Chair of gender & sexuality studies, and Professor of English, gender & sexuality studies, and American studies & ethnicity at USC. She is also co-editor of the award-winning book series, Postmillennial Pop with Henry Jenkins at NYU Press. Tongson has two books in progress: Empty Orchestra: Karaoke, Queer Aesthetics, Queer Theory (Duke University Press), and NORMPORN: Television and the Spectacle of Normalcy (NYU Press). She is also co-host and executive producer of the podcast Waiting to X-Hale with Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh. (www.karentongson.org; Twitter @inlandemperor; Instagram @tongsonator)

Amy Villarejo has been the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Humanities in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. Most recently, she is the author of Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire (Duke University Press) and the co-editor with Ron Gregg of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook to Queer Cinema (Oxford University Press). She will be joining the Department of Film, TV, and Digital Media at the School of Theatre, Film, and Television at UCLA in the fall of 2020.

Rebecca Wanzo is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (SUNY Press, 2009). Her most recent book, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (NYU Press, 2020) examines how Black cartoonists have used racialized caricatures to criticize constructions of ideal citizenship, as well as the alienation of African Americans from such imaginaries. She has published in venues such as American Literature, Camera Obscura, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Signs, Women and Performance, and numerous edited collections. She has also written essays for media outlets such as CNN, the LA Review of Books, Huffington Post, The Conversation, and the comic book Bitch Planet.

Kristen Warner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at The University of Alabama.  She is the author The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting (Routledge, 2015). Her research interests are centered at the juxtaposition of televisual racial representation and its place within the media industries, particularly within the practice of casting. Warner’s work can be found in Television and New Media, Camera Obscura, and a host of anthologies and online websites.

Brenda R. Weber is Provost Professor and the Jean C. Robinson Scholar in the Department of Gender Studies and affiliate faculty member in American Studies, English, the Center for the Research of Race and Ethnicity in Society, and The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. Weber works across gender studies and media, literary, and cultural theory, with a focus on media and popular culture's role in shaping and regulating bodies, identities, and subjectivities as tied to gender, sexuality, race, ability, and class (and their necessary intersectional ties). Her work engages a wide archive of mostly discredited cultural texts, including non-canonical 19th-century women's writing and contemporary media, specifically literature, film, and television.

Khadijah Costley White is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. White researches media, culture, and politics. Her book, The Branding of Right-Wing Activism: The News Media and the Tea Party (Oxford, 2018) examines the rise of the Tea Party in online, print, broadcast, and cable news. She has been a White House intern on the Obama broadcast media team, a National Association of Black Journalists and United Nations fellow, and an assistant producer for Now on PBS (formerly Now with Bill Moyers). In graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, she was a Fontaine Fellow and Woman of Color at Penn award recipient. She is currently a 2020-2021 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow completing a community media project on lockdown culture in schools.

Mimi White is a professor in Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University. She is the author of Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television (UNC Press, 1992), co-author of Media Knowledge: Popular Culture, Pedagogy, and Critical Citizenship (SUNY Press, 1992), and co-editor of Questions of Method in Cultural Studies (Blackwell, 2006). Recent publications have dealt with property television and Mad Men. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pembroke Center, Brown University (1986-87); a Fulbright Fellow in the Department of Communications, Helsinki University (1994); and held the Bicentennial Fulbright Chair in North American Studies at Helsinki University (2004-05).

Jacinta Yanders is an Assistant Professor of English at the College of DuPage. Her research often revolves around topics such as television remakes and representations in media, and it has appeared in outlets such as Transformative Works and Cultures and Flow. Jacinta teaches classes in a variety of areas, including Writing, Film Studies, Literature, and Digital Media. She often writes about her teaching experiences on her own site – Teach to Learn. Learn to Teach – and has also contributed writing about teaching to the Pedagogy & American Literary Studies blog.