Department: Entertainment and Media Studies

Booker T. Mattison was invited by the Writers Guild East in New York to participate in showrunner trainer for non-fiction shows in New York on November 16th and 17th.

Jay Hamilton organized and led a panel titled “Mass Communication and Transnational Resistance: Independent Media Centers 20 Years On” at the Union for Democratic Communications international conference in Oakland. The panelists addressed the chequered legacy of IMCs, their growth and decline, their form and practice of online/online-assisted social activism since their emergence in Seattle 1999 during the […]

Booker T. Mattison, His film Bosniak screened at the Morehouse College Human Rights Film Festival Thursday Oct 10th at 3:15p and at the Hampton University Film Festival, Hampton, VA Nov. 12th.  https://morehousefilmfest2019.eventive.org/schedule/bosniak-5d642379a4500d0029a0429c.

Abstract: The early 1970s marked a number of significant changes in the television landscape: new regulatory structures, the growth of cable, and shifts in programming including a steep rise in televised reruns. By 1972, reruns constituted over half of prime time network television. Although this practice benefited the financial bottom-line for producers, it was frustrating […]

Booker T. Mattison has been awarded a Special Funding Grant ($750) from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts to support visual effects and film festival submission costs associated with his short film, Ungubani (Who Are You?). The 15-minute narrative short film tells the story of a young black man who puts himself at risk […]

Abstract: Kim Kardashian has received much attention for her media empire, including her game, published by Glu Mobile. The game’s premise plays a role in what I characterize as “Feminine Play Style,” an emerging mode of video games that functions through assumptions about an idealized vision of the woman player and her relationship with leisure […]

Kate Fortmueller received the David H. Culbert Routledge-IAMHIST Prize for Best Article by an Established Scholar 2018 for:  Fortmueller, K. (2018.) “Gendered Labour, Gender Politics: How Edith Head Designed her Career and Styled Women’s Lives,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television Vol. 38 No. 3, 474-494.

Abstract: In the 1970s, almost fifty years before the “Time’s Up” movement, women in Hollywood unions organized “women’s committees” to counter institutional sexism and address rampant underemployment. While the unions supported the general motive behind these committees’ efforts, women activists struggled to gather information about hiring practices and enact policy changes. To understand gender inequity […]

Vincent, Theodore*, and Jay Hamilton. (Forthcoming.) “Narrativizing Climate Change Through Popular Culture.”  The Peace Review. Abstract: This article attempts to explain lack of action taken to address climate change. It locates part of the problem in the difficulty of concretely grasping something as amorphous, complex and expansive as climate change. It argues that how climate […]

Andy Kavoori has been selected for a Fulbright award. He will serve as the Garcia-Robles-Fulbright Distinguished Chair in U.S. Studies at the Universidad Veracruzana, Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico for the Spring 2020 academic term.  He will teach courses on American Media, Culture and Politics, plus conduct ethnographic research on Son Jarocho, a regional and diasporic entertainment […]