Contributors

~~ A ~~

Hector Amaya (University of Virginia) teaches on globalization, the cultural production of political identities, Latin American film, citizenship, and Latina/os. His book Screening Cuba: Film Criticism as Political Performance During the Cold War comes out this summer with University of Illinois Press. His latest project investigates neoliberalism on American citizenship, Latinas/os, and media. You can also find him here.

Robin Andersen (Fordham University) is author of A Century of Media: A Century of War, which won the Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award. She likes to interrogate persuasion, television, and consumer culture (see her first book Consumer Culture and TV Programming); how texts mediate the environment, and the unity of fact & fiction in media culture, especially war representations. Focusing on Treme now, a piece contrasting its rhetorics to press coverage will appear in Project Censored 2012 later this year.

Tim Anderson (Old Dominion University) is in his eleventh year as a full-time college teacher, with special research interests in popular music and media studies. He loves cats, his wife, his stepchildren, chess, yoga, and you, of course. You can follow him on Twitter @loganpoppy, and can also find him here.

Megan Sapnar Ankerson (University of Michigan) researches the intersections between new media industries and visual culture online, with a particular focus on web design practices during the dot-com bubble. Additional interests include software studies, graphic design, tivo, tennis (both in reality and on the wii), sci-fi, old computers, the Martha Stewart channel on satellite radio, and movies with body swapping plots.

Robert Asen (University of Wisconsin – Madison) researches and teaches about issues relating to public deliberation and public policy.  He is the author of Invoking the Invisible Hand: Society Security and the Privatization Debates and Visions of Poverty: Welfare Policy and Political Imagination.  He is the co-editor (with Daniel Brouwer) of Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Media, Culture, and the Shape of Public Life and Counterpublics and the State.  Originally from Illinois, he has developed a strong love for fried cheese curds, brats, and fish fry.  He does not wish the Packers harm, but he does not root for them, either.

Ben Aslinger (Bentley University) teaches courses on media history, globalization, creative industries, and video games. His work can be found in the collections Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom, LGBT Identity and Online New Media, and Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries, and Cultures. When not working, he spends his time surfing Epicurious and planning his next meal. He can also be found here.

Jennifer Stevens Aubrey (University of Missouri – Columbia) studies the ways media influence young people’s self-perception, including sexuality, body image, and gender roles. She is co-editor of Bitten by Twilight: Young Culture, Media, & the Vampire Franchise, to be published by Peter Lang in June 2010.

~~ B ~~

Christine Becker (University of Notre Dame) teaches film and television history and analysis. She is the author of It’s the Pictures That Got Small: Hollywood Film Stars on 1950s Television and is currently working on a manuscript comparing contemporary American and British television aesthetics. She also runs News for TV Majors, and can be found here.

Mary Beltrán (University of Texas – Austin) writes and teaches on the production of race, gender, and class in film, television, and celebrity culture; recent projects have explored mixed race and questioned “post-racial” representation.  To that end, she’s fascinated with and trying to figure out Glee. She’s the author of Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes and co-editor of Mixed Race Hollywood.

James Bennett (London Metropolitan University) is the author of Television Personalities: Stardom and the Small Screen (Routledge) and (with Niki Strange) editor of Television as Digital Media (Duke University Press) and (with Tom Brown) Film & Television after DVD.

Megan Biddinger (University of Michigan) studies the intersections of gender and sexuality and religion and spirituality in film and television. She’s also interested in popular music and the uses and meanings of sound recording and listening technologies.

Trevor J. Blank (Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg) is a folklorist who studies humor on the Internet following mass-mediated disasters.  He is the editor of Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World, as well as the electronic journal New Directions in Folklore.

Andrew Bottomley (University of Wisconsin – Madison) researches media and cultural history and historiography, particularly cultural studies of media and technology; new media and technological convergence; popular music and sound studies; taste, cultural value, and social status; television style and aesthetics. He is also the publisher/editor of the online music, arts, and entertainment magazine Skyscraper.

Will Brooker (Kingston University, London) researches popular texts and their relationship with audiences, often across different historical contexts. He has published widely, and his books include Batman Unmasked, Using the Force, Alice’s Adventures, The Audience Studies Reader, The Blade Runner Experience and the BFI Film Classics monograph on Star Wars. His next monograph is called Hunting the Dark Knight, and due for 2012.

Robert Alan Brookey (Northern Illinois University) teaches rhetoric and media, and he studies how the cultural industries use new media to collapsepromotion into product. He recently published Hollywood Gamers: Digital Convergence in the Film and Video Game Industries (Indiana University Press).  His work has also appeared in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Games and Culture, and Convergence.

Bill Brown (University of Wisconsin – Madison) is a visual artist who lives in Madison, Wisconsin.  His recent work has included two collaborative projects with Sabine Gruffat: “Time Machine,” a multimedia performance, and “Bike Box,” a locative media bicycle project.  He recently completed a short film about the planet Uranus.

Chiara Bucaria (University of Bologna, Italy) investigates the translation and adaptation of audiovisual products for different lingua-cultural contexts, with a particular interest in the transfer of different forms of humor and their perception on the part of audiences. Chiara is co-editor of Between Text and Image: Updating Research in Screen Translation and author of Dark Humour As a Culture Specific Phenomenon: A Study in Audiovisual Translation. She can be found here.

Colin Burnett (Washington University in St. Louis) specializes in questions of authorial intention and problem-solving and in postwar French cinema, culture and film style.  He is currently writing a study of Robert Bresson’s style in light of the cultural marketplace that emerged after the Liberation.  He is also interested in the points of intersection between film studies and art history.  He has written for Studies in French Cinema, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and has chapters in two recent anthologies, one on European film theory and one on Rudolf Arnheim.

Kristina Busse (independent scholar) has been an active media fan and has published a variety of essays on fan fiction and fan culture. Kristina is coeditor, with Karen Hellekson, of Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (2006), and founding coeditors of Transformative Works and Cultures, an online-only international peer-reviewed journal about fan cultures and fan works. You can find her here.

~~ C ~~

Karma R. Chávez (University of Wisconsin – Madison) writes and teaches on social movement and coalition building, queer, feminist intersectional theory, and the rhetorical practices of marginalized groups. She is currently finishing a book, titled Queer/Migration Politics: Coalitional Possibilities and Belonging in U.S. Rhetorical Imaginaries, which examines where queer politics and migration politics intersect in the U.S. public sphere.

Mike Chopra-Gant (London Metropolitan University) is a cultural historian with broad interests in aspects of 20^th and 21^st century American pop culture, but particularly cinema and television. He is the author of Hollywood Genres and Postwar America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir (IB Tauris) and Cinema and History: The Telling of Stories (Wallflower) and his third book, The Waltons: Myth, Nostalgia and Seventies America, will be published by IB Tauris in 2012. Mike is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Popular Culture.

Jennifer Clark (Fordham University) is currently thinking about emotional expressions and temporal experiences of masculinity in post-feminist culture; TV aesthetics and history; and gender, space, and trash/low cult texts. She has published in Television & New Media, Screen, and Spectator.

Melissa Click (University of Missouri – Columbia) has research interests that include audience and fan studies, ideological analysis of popular culture, particularly concerning messages around gender, race, class, and sexuality. She is co-editor of a forthcoming anthology on Twilight. Her work has been published in Fandom and in Popular Communication, Women’s Studies in Communication, and Flow. You can also find her here.

Norma Coates (University of Western Ontario) researches and writes about music, gender, television, age, race, culture, identity and a bunch of other things.  She is working on a book about rock and roll on American network television in the 1950s and 1960s.  She is exposed to way too much ‘tween television and music by dint of motherhood.

Christopher Cwynar (University of Wisconsin – Madison) researches questions pertaining to nations and nationalism as they intersect with the mass media and the virtual realm. He is interested in Canadian public broadcasting, particularly the manner in which nationalist discourses have developed around CBC Radio’s various channels and incarnations.

~~ D ~~

Evan Davis studies authorship and style in the films of Orson Welles. He is also interested in the history of American film criticism, developments in contemporary world cinema, and the films of Nicholas Ray. His work has appeared in Film Comment Magazine.

Max Dawson (Northwestern University) teaches and writes on television history, technology, and form. He has published work on home video history, mobile television, and short-form web video in a number of journals and edited collections. Follow his 140-character rants on NBC’s demise, Survivor, and his cats Buddy and Landry @fymaxwell, or check out his website.

Bonnie Dow (Vanderbilt University) is a feminist scholar of rhetoric and media. She is the author of Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement Since 1970 and co-editor of the Handbook of Gender and Communication and the Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, vol. 1, 17^th-19^th Centuries. She is currently working on a project about broadcast news coverage of the second wave of U. S. feminism.

Sean C. Duncan (Miami University) studies interactive media, learning, literacy, and fan communities, with a focus on digital games. He writes on gaming communities and learning, and is the co-editor (with Betty Hayes) of the upcoming book Videogames, Affinity Spaces, and New Media Literacies. Sean also blogs at Miami’s AIMS blog and his personal site se4n.org. He hopes to someday learn how to play a Spy in Team Fortress 2, if just because he’s always wanted to learn French.

~~ E ~~

Liz Ellcessor (Miami University) researches the ways in which the structures and policies of internet media shape social practices, with a particular focus on embodiment, identity and disability. She is also interested in online celebrity, video games, and MTV’s many media ventures. Her work has appeared in Information, Communication, & Society and is forthcoming in Cinema Journal, and her (infrequent) blogging home is Dis/Embody.

Tarik Ahmed Elseewi (Vassar College) is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Television Studies at Vassar College. As an Egyptian-American scholar, Tarik has been interested in both sides of the hyphen, writing and researching on Egyptian and Arab media and national identity, the representation of Arabs and Muslims in American media, the history of broadcasting and representational regimes in the United States, and transnational/global media issues especially around issues of national and cultural identities.

~~ F ~~

Joy V. Fuqua (Queens College/City University of New York) is author of Ill Effects: Prescribing Television in the Hospital and at Home, forthcoming from Duke University Press. Fuqua’s current research examines the culture and economic aspects of disaster in relation to home. Some of her work may be found in the Journal of Television and New Media and Celebrity Studies.

~~ G ~~

Lindsay H. Garrison (University of Wisconsin – Madison) researches issues related to celebrity, television, and youth markets, including gender and the construction of teen/”tween” audiences; early teen gossip magazines; and gender, labor, and child stardom. She is an avid viewer of television for all ages, has a love/hate relationship with Miley Cyrus, and wishes more Baby Boomers had kept their old issues of 16 and TigerBeat.

Kevin Glynn (University of Canterbury in Aotearoa/New Zealand) teaches media studies, cultural studies, and American studies.  He has published widely in media and cultural studies journals and is author of Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power and the Transformation of American Television (Duke University Press).  His current research projects involve Indigenous media practices; media convergence; and intersections between popular culture, (cultural) citizenship, US political culture, and the media.

Ian Gordon (National University of Singapore) is an Australian historian of the USA who works on media. His works include Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, Comics and Ideology (ed), Film and Comic Books (ed), and an array of book chapters and essays.

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin – Madison) researches and consumes comedy, political entertainment, audiences (yummy), contemporary television, convergence, and international media. His most recent book, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, joins Television Entertainment, Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality, and the co-edited Satire TV. He also blogs at The Extratextuals, and can be found here.

Sabine Gruffat (University of North Carolina) is a French American digital media artist living and working in Madison, WI.  Sabine’s films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide.  Currently she is working on a feature film about Dubai and Detroit, performing with Bill Brown in TIME MACHINE, and developing mobile media applications for iPhone.  She can be found here.

~~ H ~~

Germaine Halegoua (University of Kansas) researches the relationship between new media technologies, practices and the urban environment; cultural geography of globalization; new media and civic engagement; ubiquitous computing; and telecommunications policy. She is currently finishing her dissertation titled, New Mediated Spaces and the Urban Environment.

Mary Beth Haralovich (University of Arizona) teaches television and film history in the School of Theatre, Film & Television.  Among her studies of television are:  popular appeal of Magnum, p.i.; geo-politics of civil rights in I Spy; and third wave feminism in Mad Men.  Her social history of the 1950s suburban family situation comedy has been reprinted several times.  Co-editor of Television, History, and American Culture:  Feminist Critical Essays (Duke University Press), Haralovich is a founder and Board Member of the International Conference on Television, Video, New Media, Audio and Feminism:  Console-ing Passions.

C. Lee Harrington (Miami University) researches audiences and fans, with a specific focus on the US daytime soap opera world for the past 20+ years.  She co-edits Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture with Jonathan Gray and Cornel Sandvoss and recent publications appeared in International Journal of Cultural Studies and Transformative Works & Cultures.

John Hartley (Queensland University of Technology, Australia) has been “reading television” for quite a while, most recently in Television Truths. His latest book is The Uses of Digital Literacy. His interests include popular culture, media and journalism. Lately he has focused on creative industries and innovation, leading to current work on the convergence of evolutionary/complexity theory with the study of culture, a.k.a. ‘cultural science.’ John is editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies.

Mark Hayward (The American University of Paris) researches the relationship between media, identity and technology. One current research projects analyzes the internationalization of public service broadcasting. Another project focuses on debates about the transformation of subjectivity in relation to technology drawing on the work of Gilbert Simondon.

Heather Hendershot (Queens College/CUNY Graduate Center) studies children’s television, conservative media, horror films, comedy, and sci-fi.  She is the editor of Nickelodeon Nation: The History, Politics, and Economics of America’s Only TV Channel for Kids and author of Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture, and What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest (spring 2011). Hendershot is also editor of Cinema Journal, the official publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Matt Hills (Cardiff University) has published widely on fandom and cult media. His most recent book is Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the Twenty-first Century (IB Tauris, 2010), and he’s working on a spin-off about the spin-off Torchwood. Matt can be found here and on twitter @mat_hills

Jonah Horwitz (University of Wisconsin – Madison) teaches film and public speaking, and is researching the interactions between live television drama, theater, and film in the 1950s and early 1960s. His other interests include European silent film, photography and film, and film technology and aesthetics.

Nina Huntemann (Suffolk University) researches new media technologies, particular video and computer games, and incorporates feminist, critical cultural studies and political economy perspectives. She co-edited with Matthew Thomas Payne the anthology Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games, and she is producer, writer, and director of the forthcoming educational video, Game Over 2: Gender, Race and Violence in Video Games (to be distributed by the Media Education Foundation). She can also be found here.

Kyra Hunting (University of Wisconsin – Madison) (formerly Kyra Glass von der Osten)  researches depictions of family, gender and sexuality, and religious faith in contemporary popular film and television. She is particularly interested in how these loaded issues intersect in many programs. She also studies video games, particularly their relationships to control and the adaptation of children’s literature and film into video games. She still gets that love at first sight, slightly buzzed feeling when the lights go down in a movie theater and is glad to make use of the many hours her parents said she wasted as a child watching tv.

~~ J ~~

Josh David Jackson (University of California – Berkeley) researches the industrial and cultural impact of  TV on the internet and the internet on TV. His other interests include ‘70s rock music, antiquated recording media, comic books, and the representation of marsupials in popular culture.

Sarah Jedd (University of Wisconsin – Madison) researches and teaches an upper level criticism course on the rhetoric of reproductive rights. Her work on the Planned Parenthood Federation of America explores the ways in which discourses of citizenship, pronatalism, and motherhood reproduce images of ideal families. Her most recent, co-authored, chapter appears in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address.

Derek Johnson (University of Wisconsin – Madison) researches the cultural processes by which media properties are shared across multiple sites of production. His work was appeared in venues including Velvet Light Trap and Popular Communication. He is working on a book tentatively titled There is No IP in Team: Collaborative Production and Shared Creativity in the Media Franchise. You can also find him here.

Jeffrey P. Jones (Old Dominion University) writes and teaches on entertainment television and popular politics, including news and talk shows. He is the author of Entertaining Politics: Satiric Television and Political Engagement, and co-editor of Satire TV and The Essential HBO Reader. He also hopes Roger Ailes slips on black ice this winter. He can also be found here.

~~ K ~~

Kelly Kessler (DePaul University), when not comatose in front of her television or ranting on Facebook, teaches American television and film studies, often focusing on issues of gender, genre, and sexuality. Most recently she has been examining the musicalization of fictional television (because it’s cool when sitcoms sing) and the transtextual targeting and branding of the fans of Army Wives and Heroes. Her book, Destabilizing the Hollywood Musical, Music, Masculinity, and Mayhem, will be released by Palgrave in late 2010.

Danny Kimball (University of Wisconsin – Madison) studies the interaction of new media policy and users, particularly participatory media, remix culture, and “Web 2.0.” He enjoys pop music, slow food, and his hometown football team.

Bill Kirkpatrick (Denison University) specializes in U.S. broadcast history, cultural approaches to media policy, and media and disability. His publications include articles in Radio Journal, Journal of the Society for American Music, The Journal of Popular Culture, and several anthologies, and he currently is working on a book project about localism in American media.

Amanda Ann Klein (East Carolina University) teaches and researches in the areas of film history and historiography, film genres, African American cinema, exploitation cinema, and reality television. Her manuscript, American Film Cycles and their Audiences, will be published by the University of Texas Press. You can find her here and read her blog here.

Simone Knox (University of Reading) researches and teaches television and film in relation to matters of the trans-national, aesthetics and medium specificity, and representations of the body. She has published in journals including Journal of Popular Film and Television and Critical Studies in Television. She also blogs at Screens and Stages and can be found here.

Derek Kompare (Southern Methodist University) is primarily interested in how media forms and genres develop at the intersection of culture and industry. He is the author of Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television, and the forthcoming CSI, as well as several articles on television form, genre, authorship, and fandom. An unrepentant Doctor Who fanboy with an agnostic interest in comics and cuisine, he occasionally also writes at his blog, but is usually more readily available on Twitter @d_kompare, and can be found here.

Jon Kraszewski (Seton Hall University) studies cultural production in the media industries, race and reality TV, and the cultural geography of mediated sports. He is author of The New Entrepreneurs: An Institutional History of Television Anthology Writers. He is currently working on a book project about mixed-race identities on reality TV programs in the 2000s.

Shanti Kumar (University of Texas – Austin) teaches courses on globalization of media; technology and culture; postcolonial theory and criticism and Indian cinema and television. He is the author of Gandhi Meets Primetime and the co-editor (with Lisa Parks) of Planet TV: A Global Television Reader.

~~ L ~~

Tama Leaver (Curtin University, Australia) teaches and researches internet  communications and the changing nature of media and identity. His first book *Artificial Culture: Identity, Technology, and Bodies * is due to be  published by Routledge in December 2011. He can be found on twitter at @tamaleaver and his main web presence is TamaLeaver.net.

Suzanne Leonard (Simmons College) specializes in feminist media studies, women’s literature, and American cinema. She is the author of Fatal Attraction, and is currently working on a book about female adultery in popular culture.

Amanda Lotz (University of Michigan) has published books examining the rise of female-centered dramas and cable channels as a result of the competitive conditions of the 1990s (Redesigning Women: Television After the Network Era), and exploring how shifts in the television industry beginning in the 1980s changed the prime time content produced and the role of television in culture (The Television Will Be Revolutionized and Beyond Prime Time: Television Programming in the Post-Network Era). You can also find her here.

~~ M ~~

Madhavi Mallapragada (University of Texas – Austin) researches and writes about online media, Asian American cultures, satellite television and immigrant politics. She is working on a book about web cultures assembled around Indian American formations since the mid-90s. You can also find her here:

Daniel Marcus (Goucher College) writes on and teaches media and politics, documentary and alternative media, and cultural history. He wrote Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics (Rutgers University Press) and edited ROAR! The Paper Tiger Television Guide to Media Activism.

Kelli Marshall (University of Toledo) writes and teaches on film and Shakespeare. Originally from Louisiana, she now finds herself surviving Midwest winters, winding through corn mazes, and taking full advantage of Cedar Point. Anything related to Shakespeare, Gene Kelly, or cocker spaniels usually captures her undivided attention. Here is her blog as well as Facebook and Twitter pages.

Nick Marx (University of Wisconsin – Madison) researches sketch comedy and television’s multichannel era. He enjoys the music of MF Doom, crock-pot cookery, and NBA basketball.

Vicki Mayer (Tulane University) researches various topics, ranging from grassroots video and reality TV to ethnic identity and cultural citizenship, all sharing an interest in how people construct a sense of community from their everyday cultural practices. She is author of Producing Dreams, Consuming Youth: Mexican Americans and Mass Media, co-editor of Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, and proud to be associated with the low and trashy aspects of popular culture. You can also find her here.

Allison McCracken (DePaul University) is author of a forthcoming book on crooners, Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning and American Culture, 1925-1934, from Duke University Press.

John McMurria (University of California – San Diego) is interested in constructs of cultural citizenship in media institutions, regulatory arenas, and audiovisual texts with attention to contestations across registers of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation and globalization. He
is currently working a history of cable television and citizenship in the US. You can find him here too.

Myles McNutt (University of Madison – Wisconsin) researches online critical communities, the relationship between place and genre in television, and the biological and psychological effects of simultaneously completing graduate school and writing television criticism.

Sreya Mitra (University of Wisconsin – Madison) researches issues of stardom, national identity, gender, and sexuality in contemporary popular Hindi cinema (aka Bollywood). She watches way too much television (mostly TLC and Indian reality shows on YouTube) and Bollywood, and experiments with Indian cuisine on weekends. Her pet obsessions are Indian politicians and Mumbai mafiosi.

Jason Mittell (Middlebury College) teaches and researches American television and media. He is the author of Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture and Television and American Culture. He is currently writing a book on narrative complexity in contemporary American television. He blogs about television and other matters at Just TV.

Jeremy Morris (University of Ottawa/University of Wisconsin – Madison) researches the current state of the popular music industry, the digitization of cultural goods and commodities, and technologies of music production, circulation and consumption. He’s also currently working on a pretty nerdy project about software and business method patents. His work has been published in Fibreculture, First Monday and in an edited collection called Sonic Mediations. Links to some of his other work, hobbies, miscellany can be found at jeremywademorris.com, the web’s premier destination for all things Jeremy Morris.

Caryn Murphy (University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh) teaches film and television history and criticism.  She researches intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in popular media and is currently working on a study of the 1960s television series Peyton Place.  She is a feminist.

Susan Murray (New York University) is the author of Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars: Broadcast Stardom and Early Television and the co-editor with Laurie Ouellette of two editions of Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture. She is currently working on a history of color television.

~~ N ~~

Philip M. Napoli (Fordham University) teaches courses in media management, new media, and media regulation.  His books include Foundations of Communications Policy; Audience Economics, and Media Diversity and Localism, as well as the forthcoming Audience Evolution; and Communications Research in Action.

Diane Negra (University College Dublin) is the editor of Old and New Media After Katrina which will be published in August, and author of What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism and Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom. With Su Holmes she is currently at work on In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity.

LeiLani Nishime (University of Washington) writes about multiracial Asian American identity, race and science fiction, and subcultural production. Her interests that, so far, have escaped the pull of academia include mid-century design, road trips, and fashion. She can also be found here:

Michael Z. Newman (University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee) studies American media and popular culture including cinema and television. Among his research interests are indie film culture and the cultural legitimation of television. Here are his Twitter and blog.

~~ P ~~

Allison Perlman (University of California – Irvine) is co-editor of Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence, and her work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies. She is currently working on a book on media activism, social movements, and media policy in the United States.

Alisa Perren (Georgia State University) researches and teaches media industry studies, television studies, and US film and television history. She is the co-editor of Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method, author of the forthcoming Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s and the Coordinating Editor of In Media Res. She also blogs at www.themediaindustries.net and tweets as @aperren.

Anne Helen Petersen (University of Texas – Austin) teaches Hollywood stars and American television while attempting to churn out a dissertation on the history of celebrity gossip. She enjoys trolling for old copies of scandal magazines on eBay and using her subscription to US Weekly as a tax write-off. You can find her regular musings at Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style.

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Sharon Ross (Columbia College Chicago) teaches TV history and critical studies and her work focuses on audience reception (Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet).  This position allows her to watch ridiculous amounts of TV in the name of research, so this bio is now being interrupted by her need to return to the TV set. She fully intends to raise her son with a healthy love of the medium. (Please do not expect any blogging when Lost is airing an episode this year…It’s simply not going to happen!).

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Avi Santo (Old Dominion University) likes superheroes in all their IP permutations. He really knows a lot about the Lone Ranger. He studies the cultural and creative roles licensers play in making popular heroes popular. He is also the co-creator of MediaCommons,  FlowTV, and the creator and current coordinating editor of In Media Res. You can also find him here.

Bradley Schauer (University of Arizona) teaches, researches, and writes about the contemporary media industries.  His other interests include classical Hollywood, cult & exploitation cinema, and the American comic book industry.  His dissertation, written at the University of Wisconsin, is entitled “The Pulp Paradox: Science Fiction and the Exploitation Tradition in Hollywood, 1950-1986.”

Eleanor Seitz (University of Wisconsin – Madison) studies race, gender, environmentalism and self-reflexivity on television, and also looks at the relationship between and television industrial policies and strategies and self-representation. She loves going to fancy cheese shops, playing with her two-year old daughter and watching good television.

Shawn Shimpach (University of Massachusetts – Amherst) teaches and researches cinema, television, media, and cultural studies.  His research has focused on the social and institutional construction of the media audience, the on-going transformation of television, the cultural history of entertainment, and the various ways that popular culture might matter to people.  He is the author of Television in Transition: The Life and Afterlife of the Narrative Action Hero and various articles and book chapters.  You can find him here and here.

Matt Sienkiewicz (Gettysburg College) is a documentarian of modest repute and a media scholar with aspirations towards modest repute. His interests include Western investment in Palestinian broadcasting, Orthodox Jewish media and baseball cards. He claims to be the only man on earth who both a) has kosher kitchen b) spent an hour in a room with Norwegian black metal band Satyricon and a vat of congealed pig fat. He is correct.

Erin Copple Smith (Denison University) researches the media industries—specifically conglomerates and the intersection of ownership and content, as well as various advertising and promotional strategies (including all the cool stuff ad agencies think they’ve created, but are really just variations on “old” techniques).

Beretta E. Smith-Shomade (Tulane University) studies television representation, industry, and culture. Her first book is Shaded Lives: African- American Women and Television (Rutgers 2002). Her second book, Pimpin’Ain’t Easy: Selling Black Entertainment Television (Routledge 2007), tackles the significance of BET in our media landscape—an entity that has received only limited scholarly engagement. Smith-Shomade has published essays in Cinema Journal, Television and New Media, and Spectator. Smith-Shomade has also worked in television news and continues to do documentary production.

Jason Sperb (Michigan State University) is a Lecturer in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. His PhD is from Indiana University, where he wrote a dissertation on the reception and industrial histories of Disney’s Song of the South (1946). He is currently researching a project on images of Hawai’i in US film and television from 1935-1970. He has contributed articles to such journals as Cinema Journal, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Biography, Culture, Theory and Critique and others. He maintains a horribly neglected blog, Jamais Vu.

Louisa Stein (Middlebury College) spends (too?) many of her waking hours thinking about the intersections of TV, transmedia culture, gender, generation, and fandom. She has published on audiences and transmedia engagement in a range of journals and edited collections including Cinema Journal, Popular Communication, and the forthcoming Flow TV anthology. She is co-editor (with Sharon Ross) of Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom. She can also be found here and on Twitter.

Jonathan Sterne (McGill University) is, among other things, author of The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003), MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke, 2012), and editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012). He can be found online at http://sterneworks.org.

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Lynnell L. Thomas (University of Massachusetts -  Boston) is a native New Orleanian and an American Studies professor whose teaching and research explore the relationship between history and memory within popular narratives.  Her recent scholarship has appeared in American Quarterly, Performance Research, and Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race, and Public Policy Reader (Marable and Clarke, eds. 2008), and she has contributed her expertise in various print media, on radio, and on television.  Her current book project examines Hurricane Katrina through the lens of New Orleans’ racialized tourism narrative.

Ethan Thompson (Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi) teaches media and cultural studies and writes about historical and contemporary television comedy. He is the author of Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture and  co-editor of Satire TV. He can also be found here.

Chuck Tryon (Fayateville State University) is the author of Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of  Media Convergence.  He has also written several essays on the role of YouTube in the 2008 election, including “Political Video Mashups as Allegories of Citizen Empowerment” (with Richard L. Edwards) for First Monday, and “Pop Politics: Online Parody Videos, Intertextuality, and Political Participation,” for Popular Communication.  He has also published an early essay on using blogs in the first-year composition classroom for the journal Pedagogy.  He frequently writes about film and media at The Chutry Experiment, where he has been blogging since 2003.

Amy Tully (University of Wisconsin – Madison) studies the intersections of gender, military culture, and collective memory of the Vietnam War in contemporary American political discourse.  She is currently working on a dissertation examining how these issues interact in discourse from the 2004 U.S. presidential election and on a project exploring the underrepresentation of women veterans in discourses about veterans’ mental health issues.

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Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (Cardiff University) teaches and does research on journalism and citizenship, and her books include Journalists and the Public, Citizens or Consumers? as well as two edited collections; the Handbook of Journalism Studies and Mediated Citizenship. She runs Cardiff’s  MA in Journalism Studies and MA in Political Communications.

Joe Wlodarz (University of Western Ontario) has published in Camera Obscura, The Velvet Light Trap, Queer TV, eds. Glyn Davis and Gary Needham (Routledge) and Hollywood Reborn, ed. James Morrison (Rutgers UP). His book American Macho is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.