The Annenberg Scholars Program
in Culture and Communication

Visiting Scholars and Guest Lecturers

SPRING 2010

Melani McAlister is Associate Professor of American Studies, International Affairs, and Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. She received her PhD in American Civilization from Brown University and her BA in International Affairs from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Prof. McAlister is the author of Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (rev. ed. 2005, orig. 2001), and the co-editor, with R. Marie Griffith, of Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States (2008). She has published in a broad range of academic journals, as well in the Washington Post, New York Times, Nation, and Middle East Report. Prof. McAlister serves on the international board of the Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut. She is currently working on a study of U.S. Christian evangelicals, popular culture, and international affairs, tentatively titled Our God in the World: The Global Visions of American Evangelicals.

Graeme Turner is the Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. One of the founding figures of cultural and media studies in Australia, his work is widely used internationally and has been translated into eight languages. He has published many books on cultural, media and film studies including British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (1990; 1996; 2003), Film as Social Practice (1988; 1993; 1999; 2006); The Film Cultures Reader (2002), Understanding Celebrity (2004), and Ending the Affair: The decline of current affairs television in Australia (2005). His most recent publications are Television Studies after TV: Understanding television in the post-broadcast era (co-edited with Jinna Tay) (2009); and Ordinary People and the Media: The demotic turn (2010).

FALL 2009

Richard Cullen Rath is Associate Professor of History at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He teaches courses on early America, Native Americans, and the history of media and the senses. Author of How Early America Sounded, Rath is currently working on two books, one an introduction to the history of hearing and the other comparing the rise of print culture in eighteenth-century North America to the rise of internet culture today. He has also written three award-winning articles on music, creolization and African American culture. In addition, Rath is a musician who has found ways to use music to “do” history whenever possible.

Media Revolutions, Past and Present 

Yeidy M. Rivero is Associate Professor in the Departments of American Culture and Screen Arts and Culture at the University of Michigan. Her work examines how national and transnational cultural identities are constructed and negotiated through media discourses about race, ethnicity, nationality, and gender. Author of Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television (Duke University Press, 2005), her work has also appeared in Media, Culture, & Society, Feminist Media Studies, Television and New Media, Global Media and Communication, Cinema Journal, and Critical Studies in Media Communication. Rivero’s current research explores the ways in which television in 1950s Cuba was utilized as a commercial-national medium to rearticulate discourses of modernity.

With Limited Commercial Interruption: Fidel Castro, Commercial Television and the Selling of a Revolution, 1959-1960

SPRING 2009

Radhika Parameswaran is an associate professor in the School of Journalism at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her areas of research are feminist cultural studies, gender and media globalization, South Asia, qualitative methods, and postcolonial studies. Her recent publications include a co-authored monograph (forthcoming in Journalism & Communication Monographs) on the cultural politics of skin color and beauty in India and a chapter "Reading the Visual, Tracking the Global” in the 2008 Sage Handbook of Critical Indigenous Methodologies. A sample of her previous articles have appeared in Communication, Culture, & Critique, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Theory, Qualitative Inquiry, and Communication Review. She is currently working on two projects: an analysis of magazine cover representations of globalizing India and the gender politics of Indian tabloid print journalism.

E-race-ing Color: Epidermal Economies of Beauty

Jefferson Pooley is Assistant Professor of Media and Communication at Muhlenberg College. His research centers on the history of communication studies, as the field's emergence has intersected with the twentieth century rise of the other social sciences. He also writes about consumer culture and and the self. Recent work includes a study of Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld’s Personal Influence (“Fifteen Pages That Shook the Field”, AAPSS 2006), which won the semi-annual Article Prize from the Forum for the History of the Human Sciences; a treatment of Edward Shils’ wartime revision of his social thought (“Edward Shils’ Turn Against Karl Mannheim: The Central European Connection”, American Sociologist 2007); and an edited collection, with David W. Park, on the field’s history (The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories, 2008). He is currently working on two short books, one on the late James W. Carey and another that revisits neglected work on the twentieth century self.

Facebook and the Self: A Status Update

Paddy Scannell worked for many years at the University of Westminster (London) where he and his colleagues established in 1975 the first undergraduate degree program in Media Studies in the UK. He is a founding editor of Media, Culture and Society which began publication in 1979 and is now issued six times yearly. He is the author of A Social History of British Broadcasting, 1922-1939 (with David Cardiff), editor of Broadcast Talk and author of Radio, Television and Modern Life. He is currently working on a trilogy. The first volume, Media and Communication, was published in June 2007 and reviews the ways in which the academic study of media developed in North America and Britain in the 20th century. The second volume, Television and the Meaning of 'Live’ (near completion) offers a new phenomenological approach to the study of media. The third volume, Love and Communication (in progress), provides further contextualisation and discussion of the themes of the two that precede it. His research interests include broadcasting history and historiography, the analysis of talk, the phenomenology of communication and culture and communication in Africa.

An Introduction to the Phenomenology of Television: What Happens When I Turn on the TV Set

Toby Miller is Professor in the Departments of English, Sociology, and Women’s Studies and Director of the University’s Program in Film and Visual Culture studies the media, sport, labor, gender, race, citizenship, politics, and cultural policy via political economy, textual analysis, archival research, and ethnography. Editor of Television & New Media and Editor and Co-Editor of book series Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Lang) and Sport and Culture (Minnesota), he was also Chair of the International Communication Association Philosophy of Communication Division, Editor of Journal of Sport & Social Issues, and Co-Editor of Social Text, the Blackwell Cultural Theory Resource Centre, and the book series Film Guidebooks (Routledge) and Cultural Politics (Minnesota). He has recently become the co-editor of Social Identities. After working in broadcasting, banking, and civil service, Toby Miller became an academic in the late 1980s, when cultural studies was starting its boom, and was able to parlay a combination of his work experience, theoretical interests, and political commitments into a new career, since which time he has taught media and cultural studies across the humanities and social sciences at the following schools: University of New South Wales, Griffith University, Murdoch University, and NYU. He is at UCR across three departments and a program, with the intention of sustaining and developing a dynamic interdisciplinary research environment in media and culture.

FALL 2008

Néstor García Canclini is Distinguished Professor at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City, Mexico and Emeritus Researcher at the National System of Researchers.  He has been a professor at the University of Texas (Austin), Duke University, Stanford University, University of Barcelona, University of Buenos Aires and University of São Paulo.  He has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, Casa de las Américas Premio de Ensayo and the Book Award of the Latin American Studies Association for Hybrid Cultures, considered the best book of Latin America in 1992.  His most important works are Consumers and Citizens, (Unniversity of Minnesota Press), and The Imagined Globalization (Duke University Press, fothcoming), Hybrid Cultures (University of Minnesota Press) and Diferentes, Desiguales y Desconectados: Mapas de la Interculturalidad.

Nick Couldry is Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London where he is Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy (www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/global-media-democracy/). Couldry joined Goldsmiths from the London School of Economics where he taught from 2001 to 2006. His interests include media power, ritual dimensions of media, audience research, media ethics and the methodology of cultural studies. He is the author or editor of seven books, including The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age (Routledge 2000), Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (Routledge 2003), Listening Beyond the Echoes: Media, Ethics and Agency in an Uncertain World (Paradigm Books, USA, 2006) and (with Sonia Livingstone and Tim Markham) Media Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He is currently working on books on mediation and society and a book on voice.

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University. Neal holds a Doctorate in American Studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Neal is the author of four books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003), and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005). Neal is also the co-editor (with Murray Forman) of That's the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004). Neal is currently completing Looking for Leroy for the New York University Press. Neal has appeared in several documentaries including Bryon Hurt's acclaimed Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes (2006), John Akomfrah's Urban Soul (2004) and the BBC's Soup Deep: the Story of Black Popular Music (2005). A frequent commentator for National Public Radio's News and Notes with Farai Chideya and Tell Me More with Michel Martin, Neal also contributes to several on-line media outlets, including NewsOne.com. Neal's blog "Critical Noir" appears at VibeMagazine.com and he also maintains a blog at NewBlackMan (http://newblackman.blogspot.com/).

Below: Professor Mark Anthony Neal and Nick Couldry at the Scholars Intro Colloquium on September 10th, 2008. Photo by Kyle Cassidy.

SPRING 2008

John Erni is Professor of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, researches on Chinese consumption of transnational culture, Asian pop, cultural tourism, sexualities in Asia, critical public health, and human rights policies.  He has held a Rockefeller Humanities Research Fellowship at Columbia University's School of Public Health in the Program on Gender, Sexuality, Health, and Human Rights.  In addition, he serves as an Executive Committee Member of the Cultural Studies Association (US), and was Chair of the Philosophy of Communication Division of the International Communication Association.  His books include Unstable Frontiers: Technomedicine and the Cultural Politics of "Curing" AIDS (Minnesota, 1994), Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology (with Ackbar Abbas; Blackwell, 2005), and Asian Media Studies: The Politics of Subjectivities (with Siew Keng Chua; Blackwell, 2005.  He completed a Master of Laws in Human Rights at the University of Hong Kong in 2005. John Erni presented a public lecture, "Legal Cultural Studies and the Politics of New Sovereignties: Remapping the Human Rights Imaginary," on March 18th, 2008.

Don Mitchell is Distinguished Professor of Geography and Chair of the Geography Department in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.  He is the author of The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (1996); Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (2000); and The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (2003), as well as numerous articles on the geography of the homelessness, labor, urban public space, and contemporary theories of culture.  His latest book, with Lynn Staeheli, called The People's Property? Power, Politics, and the Public has just been published by Routledge.  He is currently working on a new NSF-funded project called Bracero: Remaking the California Landscape, 1942-1964.  Mitchell is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and has held a Fulbright Fellowship in the Institutt for Sociologi og Samfunnsgeografi at the Universitet i Oslo. Don Mitchell presented "The Watched City: Surveillance, Security, and the Geography of Survival," a public lecture, on February 12th, 2008.

Victoria de Grazia is Professor of History at Columbia University and was our Spring guest lecturer. Professor de Grazia researches and writes on a range of political and historical themes, including "how force and persuasion, or hard and soft power, mix differently in liberal and authoritarian systems of rule," "the different ways national and family politics shape women's lives," and "how Europeans have contended with the U.S.'s rising  hegemony in the twentieth century."  Her books include Irresistible Empire (Harvard, 2005), The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (California, 1996), How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1920-1945 (California, 1992), The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, 1981). Victoria de Grazia presented "A Short Critical History of 'Soft Power', a public lecture, on April 15th, 2008.

In addition to the above scholars and visitors, the Scholars Program was pleased to sponsor an internal Penn Scholar in Spring 2008.  Peter Decherney, Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and English at the University of Pennsylvania, was an additional resource for graduate students and faculty.  Decherney specializes in film and media history, with a focus on media institutions, law, and policy.  His first book, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (Columbia, 2005), uncovers and examines collaborations between Hollywood and universities, museums, and government agencies from World War I to the Cold War.  He is working on a new book on the history and future of Hollywood and copyright law.  Peter Decherney presented a colloquium to the Annenberg community on March 5th, 2008. 

FALL 2007

S. Elizabeth Bird is currently Chair and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida and will be a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School under the auspices of the Scholars Program, teaching a course titled "Audience Ethnography: From Response to Media Practices."  Professor Bird is the author of The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World, (New York: Routledge, 2003), which won the 2004 Best Book Award granted by the International Communication Association.  In addition, her works include Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture (1996), and For Enquiring Minds: A Cultural Study of Supermarket Tabloids (1992), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.  Professor Bird's broad interests are media and popular culture, with a special emphasis on audience response and the role of the media in everyday culture.  Her work is informed by investigations in Folklore, visual anthropology, and cultural studies.  Current projects include further work on the representation of Native Americans in popular culture, and ethnographic studies of new technologies and their impact on everyday life. Elizabeth Bird presented a public lecture, "Museums as Popular Culture: The Body of Evidence in Controversial Science," on October 23rd, 2007.

Peter Dahlgren is Professor of Media and Communication Studies, Lund University, Sweden and has written extensively on the role of mass media and journalism in the development of a democratic public sphere.  Professor Dahlgren will be a Visiting Scholar under the auspices of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication, and will teach a graduate course titled, "Media, Democracy and Civic Participation."  Author of the highly acclaimed book, Television and the Public Sphere (London: Sage, 1995), Dr. Dahlgren has also co-edited (with Colin Sparks) two important collections of critical essays, Journalism and Popular Culture (1992), and Communication and Citizenship (1991).  His current research focuses on the Internet as a journalistic resource and possible basis for the foundation of a new civic culture.  Professor Dahlgren presented a public lecture on September 25th, 2007, on the topic, "New Media, Young Citizens, and Civic Cultures: Participation, Practices and Identities."

SPRING 2007

Robin Wagner-Pacifici is the Gil and Frank Mustin Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore College, taught a graduate seminar titled "Discourse and the Nation".  Professor Wagner-Pacifici is the author of  The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict's End (Chicago, 2005), as well as Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action (Cambridge, 2000), which won the 2001 Culture Section of the American Sociological Association's Best Book Award.  Her work analyzes violent events, focusing on the language and images by way of which these events are accomplished, represented and managed.  The Art of Surrender analyzes the conventions and ceremonies of military surrenders as former antagonists quit the violence of war and resume pacified relations.  The book performs its analysis by exploring the surrender documents, history paintings, photo-journalism and other media that make peace happen.  Theorizing the Standoff examines Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Republic of Texas and other clashes between anti-system groups and authorities; two earlier works, Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia vs MOVE and The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama focused, respectively on the 1985 MOVE disaster in Philadelphia and the kidnapping of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978.  Wagner-Pacifici's current project involves analyzing the recent transformation in the conception of  "national defense" in the United States.  She recevied her B.A. from Brown University in 1976 with a concentration in Compartive Literature, and her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983.   Professor Wagner-Pacifici presented a public lecture titled, "The Defense of the Nation: Reading the 9/11 Commission Report," on Febraury 20th, 2007.

Marwan Kraidy is assistant professor of international communication and international relations at American University in Washington, DC.  He is a scholar of global communication and culture and an expert on Arab media.  His seminar for graduate students is titled, "Culture and Modernity in the 'Arab Media Revolution'."  Professor Kraidy's books include Global Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives (Routledge, 2003, co-editor) and Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization (Temple University Press, 2005).  Forthcoming is a book titled Screens of Contention: Arab Media and the Challenges of Modernity.  Kraidy is on the editorial boards of Critical Studies in Media Communications, Language and Intercultural Communication, American Communication Journal, and the Arabic edition of Global Media Journal.  Professor Kraidy prsented a public lecture, titled "Idioms of Contention: Reality TV and Arab Politics," on April 10th, 2007.

Lawrence Grossberg is the Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and was our guest lecturer in Spring 2007.  Professor Grossberg gave a public lecture on the topic, "Where Have All the Moderns Gone?  When Will We Ever Learn?", March 27th, 2007.

FALL 2006

Anna McCarthy is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University and the author of Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Duke, 2001) and co-editor, with Nick Couldry, (London School of Economics) of Media/Space: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age (Routledge, 2004).  Professor McCarthy's course at the Annenberg School was titled "Media, Culture and Citizenship: Histories, Debates, Paradigms."  McCarthy presented a public lecture, on the topic "Reality TV and the Neoliberal Theater of Suffering," on September 26th, 2006.

James Curran is the founding head of the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and in 2006, became the Director of the Goldsmiths Spaces for the Media Research Programme.  He is the author or editor of eighteen books about the mass media, including Media and Power (2002) published in five languages, Culture Wars (2005) and, with Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility (2003), now in its 6th edition.  He is currently writing a book called Media and Money (forthcoming from Routledge).  While at the Annenberg School Professor Curran taught a course called "Journalism, Entertainment and Society."  Curran gave his public lecture, "Journalism, Entertainment and Democracy," on October 31st, 2006.

David Freedberg is Professor of Art History at Columbia University, and Director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America and was our guest lecturer in Fall 2006. Freedberg is best known for is work on psychological responses to art, and particularly for his studies on iconoclasm and censorship.  His more traditional art historical writing has centered on the fields of Dutch and Flemish art.  Professor Freedberg is the author of The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (2002), The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (1989), The Prints of Peter Breugel the Elder (1989).  Professor Freedberg is at present writing two books: 1) Dance, the Body and Emotion (from a historical and neuroscientific perspective), and 2) Art and the Brain, with particular reference to emotion and vision.  His public lecture, "Images of Torture: Representation, Empathy and Indifference" occurred on November 14th, 2006.

SPRING 2006

Ien Ang (University of Western Sydney) taught a semester-long grad class on Cultural Complexity. Professor Ang's public lecture, given March 21st, 2006, was titled, "From Cultural Studies to Cultural Research: Engaged Scholarship in the 21st Century." 

Slavko Splichal (University of Ljubliana) taught a semester-long grad class on The Culture of Public Opinion. Professor Splichal's public lecture, given February 14th, 2006, was titled, "In search of a 'strong' European public sphere."

Elizabeth Jelin (Universidad de General Sarmiento-IDES, Buenos Aires) was our guest lecturer in Spring 2006. Professor Jelin presented "Memories of State Violence: the Past in the Present" on April 11th, 2006.

FALL 2005

Daniel Dayan (L'ecole des haute etudes, Paris) taught a semester-long grad class on Expression and Monstration in the Public Sphere.

Kevin Robins (City University, London) taught a semester-long grad class on Transnational Media and Cultures.

Program Director

Professor Barbie Zelizer holds the Raymond Williams Chair of Communication and is the Director of the Annenberg Scholars Program in Culture and Communication. Learn more about Professor Zelizer on the ASC website.

Program Coordinator

Emily Plowman is the Progam Coordinator for the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication. If you have any questions or comments regarding the program, please contact: eplowman@asc.upenn.edu.

Also at Annenberg...

The Scholars Program augments the work done by Annenberg faculty, a number of whom conduct research and give lectures in the field of culture. Find out more about them here: Annenberg's faculty