Speaker Bios

Ariane Cruz

Ariane Cruz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University.  She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in African Diaspora Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her manuscript, The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography, is in press with New York University Press.  Her publications appear in journals such as Camera Obscura, Hypatia, Women & Performance, and The Journal of American Studies and are forthcoming in The Black Scholar. Her writing also appears in books like The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (The Feminist Press at CUNY), Black Female Sexualities (Rutgers), The Philosophy of Pornography: Contemporary Perspectives (Roman & Littlefield), and Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital (forthcoming with The University of Illinois Press). She is the recipient of various fellowships including the UC Berkeley Regents Intern Fellowship and Dean’s Normative Time Fellowship, the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Sexual Culture Dissertation Grant, the Penn State Africana Research Center Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the Penn State Institute for Arts and Humanities Resident Scholars and Artists Fellowship. Her research interests lie at the intersections between black female sexuality and black visual culture.

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Susan Douglas

Susan Douglas is the Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Communication Studies, and former department chair, at The University of Michigan.  She is author of The Rise of Enlightened Sexism:  How Pop Culture Took us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010); The Mommy Myth:  The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Undermines Women (with Meredith Michaels, The Free Press, 2004); Listening In:  Radio and the American Imagination (Times Books, 1999), which won the Hacker Prize in 2000 for the best popular book about technology and culture, Where The Girls Are:  Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (Times Books, 1994; Penguin, 1995) and Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Johns Hopkins, 1987).  She received her B.A. from Elmira College (Phi Beta Kappa) and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University.  She has lectured at colleges and universities around the country, and has written for The Nation, In These Times, The Village Voice, Ms., The Washington Post and TV Guide, and was media critic for The Progressive from 1992-1998.  Her column “Back Talk” appears monthly in In These Times.  She has appeared on The Today Show, The CBS Early Show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Working Woman, CNBC’s Equal Time, NPR’s Fresh Air, Weekend Edition, The Diane Rehm Show, Talk of the Nation, Michael Feldman’s Whad’ya Know and various radio talk shows around the country. Where the Girls Are was widely praised, and chosen one of the top ten books of 1994 by National Public Radio, Entertainment Weekly and The McLaughlin Group. She served on the Board of the George Foster Peabody awards from 2005-2010, and in 2010 was selected as Chair of the Board.  She is the 2009 recipient of the Leonardo Da Vinci Prize, the highest honor given by the Society for the History of Technology to an individual who has greatly contributed to the history of technology through research, teaching, publications, and other activities.  She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband.

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Brian Herrera

Brian Eugenio Herrera is Assistant Professor of Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. His work, both academic and artistic, examines the history of gender, sexuality and race within and through U.S. popular performance. He is the author of The Latina/o Theatre Commons 2013 National Convening: A Narrative Report (HowlRound, 2015) and his first book Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (Michigan, 2015) was recently awarded the George Jean Nathan Prize for Dramatic Criticism. He is presently at work on two new book projects: Starring Miss Virginia Calhoun and Casting – A History, a historical study of the material practices of casting in US popular performance.

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Aymar Jean Christian

Aymar Jean Christian is assistant professor of communication at Northwestern University. His manuscript, Open TV: Innovation Beyond Networks, explores web series as a space of innovation independent of legacy television development. He has been published in Continuum, Cinema Journal, Transformative Works & Cultures, and Journal of Communication Inquiry, in addition to multiple edited collections. His current research project, Open TV (beta), is a platform for television by queer, trans, cis-women or artists of color. He has released three pilots and three series, receiving recognition by the Tribeca Film Festival, Gotham Awards and the City of Chicago, along with funding from Northwestern, University of Chicago, Propeller and Voqal Funds. Dr. Christian has also served as a judge, curator and expert on video and web TV for the Peabody Awards, Tribeca Film Festival, Streamy Awards, and Philadelphia Museum of Art. He received his PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012.

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Kristen Warner

Kristen Warner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Telecommunication and Film at The University of Alabama.  She is the author The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting (Routledge, 2015). Kristen’s research interests are centered at the juxtaposition of televisual racial representation and its place within the media industries, particularly within the practice of casting. Warner’s work can be found in Television and New Media, Camera Obscura and a host of anthologies and online websites.

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