Media and Public Projects
I’m always looking for ways to take my media expertise beyond scholarly publishing and the college classroom. This page represents a sample of the kinds of projects I do - podcasting, public writing, web design, and video editing - in addition to academic writing, teaching, and research.
Podcasting
I've produced several segments for The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies' Aca-Media podcast, you can listen to a selected few here:
Academic Job Market Series
Part 1 | Part 2
Segment on The American Archive of Public Broadcasting,
March 2020
My Stint as Guest Host
January 2019
Segment on assigning podcast projects in media courses
November 2017
Video Essays
Desktop Documentary
As part of a seminar on Desktop Documentaries at SCMS 2021, I produced a three minute desktop doc about watching The Bachelor with my mom and the experience of popular culture in our every day lives. The prompt was to choose a media text, ask a question about it, research the answer, and record the process on your desktop within 3 minutes.
I'm excited to make more of these to illustrate my work in multi-modal formats in the future.
For more info on the desktop film form - check out this intro video!
Video Editing
I've started to take on freelance editing projects for scholars who need help with lecture videos, virtual conference talks, and other research based video editing projects. Check out the trailer I made recently for the Cinema's First Nasty Women archival film project.
Nanette Syllabus
Jennifer Binis and I spearheaded an ongoing crowdsourced effort to compile resources related to Hannah Gadsby's groundbreaking comedy special, which we named the Nanette Syllabus .
You can also check out Edweek's coverage of the syllabus effort here!
Web Design
I recently designed the website for the newly formed Critical Humor Studies Association.
I also designed the SCMS Comedy and Humor Studies Scholarly Interest Group website, in which I also created resource called the the "Issue Indexes" meant to act as round-ups of critical writing on recent topics relating to humor and comedy.
Broad Comedy
Founded by Stephanie Brown, Broad Comedy is a group that was originally created to bring more women into the Champaign-Urbana comedy scene. Our current mission is to more broadly diversify local comedy and create a fun, welcoming, and inclusive performance space." [ Check us out on Facebook ]
Part side project, part public outreach, and part autoethnography - Broad Comedy is a bi-weekly open mic that I co-created in the fall of 2016 with a fellow comic in Champaign-Urbana who I met when I was conducting interviews for my dissertation. She was frustrated being the only woman regularly performing stand-up in town and I wanted to try to put my research on gender and gatekeeping in stand-up culture into practice. We both thought one reason there were so few women performing in town was because they didn't see themselves in any of the comedy rooms and thus there was self-perpetuating underrepresentation.
In 2017, I took on two new co-producers, Andrew Schiver and Lisa Graff, friends and community members who also share an interest in comedy but saw no space in town in which they felt comfortable performing. The show consistently attracts standing room only crowds and has brought many performers into the scene who wouldn't have gotten on stage anywhere else.
In 2018, I graduated from University of Illinois and had to move away, but I left the show in the hilarious and capable hands of Andrew and Lisa, who have kept the show going. My hope is to one day create a new show wherever I end up long-term.
Regardless of if this experiment yields a huge crop of new women comics in the area, it has given me a deeper understanding of stand-up as a culture and art form, and will be invaluable to my research on how identity functions within the subcultural spaces of stand-up comedy.
Girls Amplified
Girls Amplified was an after-school program that I developed with my sister, a high school drama teacher at the time (now a PhD holding theater education professor). The curriculum sought to promote media literacy, writing skills, empathetic listening, and public speaking skills through the lens of social justice and community building. Rather than individual empowerment, our aim was to give girls in junior high and high school the tools to collaborate with one another to harness the power of storytelling to create social change. After a successful fundraising campaign in 2015, we were able to create and host our website and pilot our first two program sites.
The program consisted of 10-12 week, twice a week course in which junior high and high school aged girls learned:
1. How to write, perform, and produce narratives, theater pieces, and video
2. How to critically analyze and interpret media stories
3. How to listen to and affirm the stories of others
4. How to start to collaborate, build communities and incite change through storytelling
Girls came out of our initial program with the confidence and tools with which to start making their voices heard and affecting change in their communities. The program ended with a showcase in which each girl will share a live performance or media piece that tells an important narrative about her life.
In the fall of 2015 we piloted the program at Central City Values High School in Los Angeles, CA, a public charter school near Koreatown. We assessed the strengths and weaknesses of the program through interviews with the initial class of girls and gathered data through surveys given before and after the program. In the Spring of 2017, we developed a new curriculum for middle school students, which a colleague of mine piloted at a middle school in San Diego with the school's principal.
The original plan was to try to more fully develop the program when I landed a permanent home at a college or university - but that hasn’t happened yet, and the pandemic put the entire project on hold indefinitely. One day we hope to continue to work on the original plan, or to create something in a similar vein.
The website has since been taken down, but I’m happy to share the curriculum with anyone interested in further developing it!