Collegiate Affiliation
Communication Studies
Affiliate Faculty,
American Studies
Moving Image, Media & Sound
Links
academia.edu

I am a professor of Media and Cultural Studies. 

My interdisciplinary research engages the history, meanings, and power dynamics of media and popular culture.  Putting media and cultural studies into conversation with social and political theory, I study popular media's role in shaping, governing, and regulating bodies, subjectivities, and differences, and in mediating citizenship and public/private life. My areas of interest include feminist media studies, popular documentary and reality TV, lifestyle and influencers, true crime, class, race, and precarity, and biopolitics and governmentality.

I am the author/co-author or editor/co-editor of seven books, including Lifestyle TV, Keywords for Media Studies, Better Living Through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship, Viewers Like You? How Public Television Failed the People, Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, The Media Studies Reader, and A Companion to Reality Television. My work has also appeared widely in journals--incliuding European Journal of Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies, Television & New Media, Cinema Journal, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Media--and book anthologies.

I am the editor-in-chief of the journal Television & New Media and a columnist for Film Quarterly.

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