Dr. Wenhong Chen, Co-Director
Dr. Chen is an associate professor of media sociology, the founding co-director of Center for Entertainment and Media Industries, and a Distinguished Scholar in the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Chen has more than 90 publications, including articles in top-ranked journals in the fields of communication and media studies, sociology, and management. Dr. Chen’s research has received awards from the Academy of Management, International Association of Chinese Management Research, American Sociological Association and International Communication Association. She served as the chair of the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Section of American Sociological Association in 2017-2018. Dr. Chen’s work has been reported by the media in the U.S., China, and Canada. Dr. Chen’s current project examines how U.S. and Chinese AI policies affect tech and media entrepreneurship.
Dr. Alisa Perren, Co-Director
Dr. Perren is an associate professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film and Co-Director of the Center for Entertainment and Media Industries (CEMI) at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching interests include television studies, media industry studies, and US film and television history.
Dr. Perren is co-editor of Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (Blackwell, 2009) and author of Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s (University of Texas Press, 2012). Her forthcoming book, The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood, is co-authored with Greg Steirer for BFI’s International Screen Industries series. Her work has appeared in a range of publications, including Film Quarterly, Journal of Film and Video, Journal of Popular Film & Television, Cinema Journal, Managing Media Work, and Moving Data.
From 2010 to 2013, Perren served as Coordinating Editor for In Media Res, an online project experimenting with collaborative, multi-modal forms of scholarship. She is co-founder and a member of the editorial collective for Media Industries, an online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal. She also served as co-managing editor for Media Industries from 2012 to 2017. Perren presently is the organizer of Media Industry Conversations, a speaker series through which industry professionals discuss today’s evolving media landscape.
Cindy McCreery, Associate Director
Cindy McCreery was a Walt Disney/ABC Feature Writing Fellow and has since sold feature projects to New Line Cinema, Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, National Geographic Films, Warner Brothers, MGM, Branded Entertainment and Lionsgate. She also writes for television and has sold projects to SyFy Channel, Disney Channel, NBC, TNT, Televisa USA, Universal Television and AMC’s Shudder. Cindy has been teaching screenwriting and television writing since 2004 at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and is currently an Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin in The Department of Radio-TV-Film.
Dr. Lesley Willard, Program Director
Dr. Willard is a lecturer in the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching interests include fan studies, platform studies, industry studies, and work studies; in all of these arenas, she focuses on labor and professionalization. She completed her Ph.D. in media studies here at UT Austin, where she served as a teaching assistant and assistant instructor for RTF courses. In 2017, she was recognized as UT Austin’s top teaching assistant, receiving the William S. Livingstone Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Assistant award. She has also taught at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) and Salt Lake Community College (SLCC). She is a research fellow with and the Program Director of Moody’s new Center for Entertainment and Media Industries (CEMI). She is also a co-founder and organizer of the annual Fan Studies Network-North America (FSN-NA) conference. Previously, she has coordinated the Flow Conference and UT’s Women & Gender Studies Emerging Scholarship Conference. She has served in an editorial capacity with Big Data & Society, The Velvet Light Trap, and Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture. She has also served as the Director of UT’s Queer Graduate Student Alliance (QGSA) and the Graduate Student Representative for the Fan and Audience Studies Scholarly Interest Group for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS).
Dr. Iris Chyi
Dr. Chyi is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in media economics and her work focuses on user demand for multiplatform newspapers. She examined the viability of digital subscriptions and revealed a strong attachment to the print product among newspaper readers. Her “Ramen Noodles Theory” suggests that online news, like ramen noodles, is an inferior good. Her book, Trial and Error: U.S. Newspapers’ Digital Struggles toward Inferiority, challenges U.S. newspapers’ technology-driven strategy, calling for a critical reassessment of the future of the industry.
Her research receives substantial attention from the news industry. She has addressed major industry conferences in the U.S., Europe (WAN-IFRA), and Latin America (Inter American Press Association), and offered advice to news organizations including The New York Times. Her work has been covered by media outlets worldwide, such as The Washington Post, USA Today, The Guardian, Columbia Journalism Review, Politico Magazine, Bloomberg, Fortune, Nieman Journalism Lab, Poynter, Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, WAN-IFRA (Germany), The Sunday Independent (Ireland), El Mundo (Spain), Excelsior (Mexico), La Nacion (Argentina), The Korea Times, CBC Radio One (Canada), among others.
Chyi has published more than 50 journal articles and book chapters and received many research awards, including the News Audience Research Paper Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, two Faculty Research Awards from the College of Communication at UT Austin, the Top Research Paper Award from the International Symposium on Online Journalism, two Top Paper Awards from the Newspaper Division of AEJMC, and an award for industry relevance from the International Newspaper Marketing Association. She serves on the editorial board of these research journals: Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism Studies, Digital Journalism, International Journal on Media Management, Communication and Society, and Journal of Information Society.
Chyi teaches Economics of New Media, Audience Research, Introduction to Research Methods, and Advanced Social Science Methods at the graduate level, as well as Domestic Issues and Global Perspectives and Digital Production and Analytics at the undergraduate level. She received the Barry Sherman Teaching Award from the Media Management & Economics Division of AEJMC, which recognizes excellence and innovation in the teaching of media management and economics.
Chyi received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas at Austin, a master’s degree from Stanford University, and a bachelor’s degree from National Taiwan University. She taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Arizona prior to joining the UT faculty in 2007. She worked for several media organizations in the U.S. and in Asia.
Kathryn Fuller-Seeley
Dr. Fuller-Seeley’s research specialization focuses on American film, radio and television history and audience reception studies. Before joining UT in 2013, Fuller-Seeley taught at Georgia State University in Atlanta and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. She received a BA in History from Agnes Scott College in 1982 and an MA and PhD in American History from the Johns Hopkins University in 1993.
Fuller-Seeley’s latest book, Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy, published by University of California Press in 2017, is an examination of the career of entertainer Jack Benny in the context of rapidly changing media industry and cultural norms in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s. She received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers in 2013 to support the project.
She is also the author of At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Smithsonian 1996/University Press of Virginia 2001), an examination of how film exhibition and moviegoing culture spread across the U.S. in the early silent film era. She is co-author (with Garth Jowett and Ian Jarvie) of Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy (Cambridge, 1996), a study of the first large-scale academic study of media influence on children in the 1930s. She edited Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing (University of California 2008). She has written Celebrate Richmond Theater (Dietz Press, 2001), a history of 200 years of stage presentation and film exhibition in Virginia’s capital city. One Thousand Nights at the Movies: An Illustrated History of Motion Pictures 1895-1915 (co-authored with Q. David Bowers) (Whitman, 2013), is a richly-illustrated history of the origins of film production and exhibition in the U.S.
Fuller-Seeley has published book chapters in numerous anthologies on topics such as film stars Shirley Temple, and Rin Tin Tin, Dish Night giveaways in Depression-era movie theaters, early TV audiences, film exhibition and moviegoing history. She is featured in the 2017 motion picture history documentary “Saving Brinton” (Northland Films). She has been a consultant on PBS documentaries on actress Mary Pickford, and comedian Bob Hope, and for other moviegoing history documentaries and museum exhibits. She is currently working on scholarly projects about silent film directors/actors Francis Ford and Grace Cunard, Jack Benny’s television program, and early traveling film exhibition in the Midwest and Northeast.
Shanti Kumar
Dr. Kumar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Asian Studies, the Center for Asian-American Studies and the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas-Austin.
Before joining UT in 2006, Prof. Kumar taught at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and the University of North Texas in Denton. He received his B.Sc. degree in Math, Physics and Chemistry from Osmania University, Hyderabad in India in 1987. He received a B.A. in Communication and Journalism in 1988, and an M.A. in Communication and Journalism in 1989, also from Osmania University. He received an M.A. in Media Studies from Texas Christian University in 1994, and Ph.D. in Telecommunications from Indiana University-Bloomington in 1998.
Prof. Kumar is the author of Gandhi Meets Primetime: Globalization and Nationalism in Indian Television (University of Illinois Press, 2006), and co-editor of Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU Press, 2003), Television at Large in South Asia (Routledge, 2012) and Global Communication: New Agendas in Communication (Routledge, 2013). He has published book chapters in several edited anthologies and articles in journals such as BioScope, Jump Cut, Popular Communication, South Asian Journal, South Asian Popular Culture, Television and New Media and Quarterly Review of Film and Video.
Prof. Kumar has professional experience in journalism, advertising and multimedia industries in India. He worked as a sub-editor and a reporter for Deccan Chronicle which is the largest-selling English-language newspaper in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. He also worked as a multimedia designer and scriptwriter in the Education and Training Division at CMC Limited; one of the leading information technology firms in India.
Madhavi Mallapragada
Dr. Mallapragada is associate professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film, the College of Communication, at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also a faculty affiliate of UT's Center for Asian American Studies (CAAS), South Asia Institute (SAI) and the Department of Asian Studies.
Dr. Mallapragada's research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of new media studies, Asian American studies and transnational cultural studies. In particular, she is interested in the online articulations of racialized, brown, and transnational cultural identities within a South Asian American context. She recently published the book Virtual Homelands: Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United States which examines the role and politics of the Web in recasting notions of Indian-American identity and cultural citizenship since the late 1990s. Her work has been published in the journals New Media and Society, South Asian Popular Culture, Popular Communication and edited anthologies Web.studies: Rewiring New Media for the Digital Age (2000), Critical Cyberculture Studies: Current Terrains, Future Directions (2006) and Re-Orienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media Beyond Borders (2010).
Jennifer McClearen
Jennifer McClearen is a feminist media scholar whose work examines the cultural production of difference in contemporary society with an emphasis on the mediation of gender, race, and sexuality in sports media. In the classroom, she blends theory and practice to train students to critically analyze and produce media culture.
Dr. McClearen’s first book, Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC, will be published with the Studies in Sports Media Series with the University of Illinois Press in April 2021. Her research can also be found in Communication and Sport, the International Journal of Communication, Continuum, New Formations, Feminist Media Studies, and The Velvet Light Trap, among others.
She is an affiliated faculty member in the Center for Sports Communication and Media at UT and a diversity scholar with the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan.
Dr. McClearen teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on gender, race, and sexuality in film and television as well as courses focused specifically on sports media.
Thomas Schatz
Dr. Schatz is the Mary Gibbs Jones Centennial Chair of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has been on the faculty since 1976, and was the Executive Director of the University of Texas Film Institute. He has written four books about Hollywood films and filmmaking, including Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System; The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era; and Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s. Schatz edited the four-volume collection, Hollywood: Critical Concepts, and he also serves as series editor of the Film and Media Studies Series for the University of Texas Press. Schatz's writing on film has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and academic journals, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Premiere, The Nation, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, and Cineaste.
Schatz lectures widely on American film and television in the U.S. and abroad, and he has delivered talks and conducted seminars for the Motion Picture Academy, the Directors Guild of America, the American Film Institute and the Los Angeles Film School. Schatz also is engaged in media production, has consulted and provided on-screen commentary for a number of film and television documentaries, and is co-producer of "The Territory," a long-running regional PBS series that showcases independent film and video work.
Schatz's recent publications include an essay on "Band of Brothers" in The Essential HBO Reader (2008) and "The Studio System and Conglomerate Hollywood," the lead essay in The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry (2008). Current publishing projects include a study of contemporary Hollywood and a revised edition of Hollywood Genres.
As Executive Director of the UT Film Institute, which he founded and launched in 2003, Schatz oversaw a program devoted to training students in narrative and digital filmmaking, and the actual production of feature-length independent films.
Suzanne Scott
Dr. Scott is an associate professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching interests include fan studies, media convergence, digital and participatory culture, social media, transmedia storytelling, comic book culture, and gender studies. She comes to Austin after previously teaching Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at Arizona State University, and serving as a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center of Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, and the University of Southern California.
Dr. Scott’s scholarly monograph, Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry (NYU Press, 2019), considers the gendered tensions underpinning the media industry’s embrace of fans as demographic tastemakers, professionals, and promotional partners within convergence culture. Surveying the politics of participation within digitally mediated fan cultures, this project addresses the "mainstreaming" of fan and geek culture over the past decade, how media industries have privileged an androcentric conception of the fan, and the marginalizing effect this has had on female fans.
She is also the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (2018), an anthology that brings together an international and interdisciplinary collection of nearly 60 established scholars to reflect on the state of the field and to point to new directions in fan studies research.
Her scholarly work has appeared in the journals Transformative Works and Cultures, Cinema Journal, New Media & Society, Participations, Feminist Media Histories, and Critical Studies in Media Communication as well as numerous anthologies, including Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (2nd Edition), How to Watch Television, The Participatory Culture Handbook, and Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica. In 2012, she was selected to represent the current generation of fan scholars to interview Henry Jenkins for the 20th Anniversary edition of Textual Poachers. She has guest blogged for the Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier and in media res, among others.
Joe Straubhaar
Dr. Straubhaar is the Amon G. Carter Centennial Professor of Communications in the School of Journalism at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the current Director of the Moody College of Communications’ Latino and Latin American Studies Program and was the Director of the Center for Brazilian Studies within the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies, 2003-2006.
His primary teaching, research and writing interests are in global media, digital media and the digital divide in the U. S. and other countries, Brazilian and Latin American television, media and migration, and global television production and flow. His graduate teaching includes media theory, global media, media and migration, Latin American media, and ethnographic/qualitative research methods. His undergraduate teaching covers the same range plus introduction to media studies. He does research in Brazil, other Latin America countries, Europe, Asia and Africa, and has taken student groups to Latin America and Asia. He has done seminars abroad on media research, television programming strategies, and telecommunications privatization. He is on the editorial board for Communication Theory, International Journal of Communication, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, Comunicación y Sociedad, Chinese Journal of Communication, and Revista INTERCOM.
His edited book, Passarelli, B., Straubhaar, J., & A. Cuevas-Cerveró. (Eds.). (2015). Handbook of Research on Comparative Approaches to the Digital Age Revolution in Europe and the Americas. Hershey PA, USA: Information Science Reference-IGI Global. His book, Television In Latin America, co-authored with John Sinclair, was published by BFI/Routledge in 2013. His edited book, The Persistence of Inequity in the Technopolis: Race, Class and the Digital Divide in Austin, Texas, was published in 2011 by University of Texas Press. His book, World Television from Global to Local, was published by Sage in 2007. A revised 9th edition of his textbook with Bob LaRose, Media Now, was published by Wadsworth. He had an edited book with Othon Jambeiro, Políticas de informação e comunicação, jornalismo e inclusão digital: O Local e o Global em Austin e Salvador (Information and communication policy, journalism and digital inclusion: The local and global in Austin and Salvador); Federal University of Bahia Press: 2005.
He has published numerous articles and essays on global media, digital inclusion, Brazilian television, Latin American media, comparative analyses of new television technologies, media flow and culture, and other topics appearing in a number of journals, edited books, and elsewhere.