Welcome to my website. My field of research and teaching is media studies (including popular literature, film, and television). I am especially interested in television history, gender representations in media, and the ways in which media texts are designed to provoke somatic and affective responses in viewers.
I recently retired from full-time teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago but continue to teach courses in the Honors College.
BOOKS
What Women Watched: Daytime Television in the 1950s (Univ. of Texas Press, 2005) draws upon original archival material to offer a critical appraisal of popular women’s genres before the prominence of soap opera from a feminist perspective.
Television and the Embodied Viewer: Affect and Meaning in the Digital Age (Taylor and Francis, 2020) takes into account phenomenology, cultural studies, and new work in bioculture and neuroscience to examine the ways in which television texts provoke emotional, visceral, and multi-sensory responses.
