Assistant Director, CEMI
Assistant Professor, Emerson College
Dr. Willard was a lecturer in the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. She was also the RTF Internship Director. Her research and teaching interests include fan studies, platform studies, and media industry 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 an external affiliate with and the Assistant Director of Moody College’s Center for Entertainment and Media Industries (CEMI). She is also a co-founder 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).