Laurie Ouellette is jointly appointed as Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, where she is currently Department Chair.

She works across the interdisciplinary fields of critical media and cultural studies, with a focus on media and popular culture's role in shaping, governing and regulating bodies, subjectivities and differences (gender, sexuality, race, ability, class).

Her recent book Lifestyle TV (2016) draws from social and political theory to situate television as a cultural technology of citizenship, lifestyle, labor and self-making. She also recently co-edited Keywords in Media Studies (2017) with Jonathan Gray, and is currently working on a new book project on Precarity Media. Laurie is co-author of Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship (2008), author of Viewers Like You? How Public Television Failed the People (2002), co-editor of Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (2009), editor of The Media Studies Reader (2012) and editor of A Companion to Reality Television (2014).

Her research has appeared in a range of journals such as European Journal of Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies, Television & New Media, Cinema Journal, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Media, and in edited collections and anthologies.

Educational Background & Specialties
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Educational Background

  • Ph.D.: Communication, University of Massachusetts, 1998
  • M.A.: Media Studies, New School for Social Research, 1993

Specialties

  • Gender and Sexuality
  • Media Studies
  • Biopolitics and Governmentality
  • Television Studies
  • Lifestyle and Consumer Culture
  • Precarity, Labor and Class
  • Digital Media and Culture
  • Media Historiography