Media Studies

 

The graduate Media Studies program (MS) focuses on the interplay of institutions, texts, and audiences of mediated communication systems. Its strengths are the history of media, media theory, and the social impact of communication technologies. Its central aim is to examine modern media-radio, television, advertising, music, and a wide range of other popular cultural expressions-within their economic, historical, cultural, political, and social contexts to understand how society and social relations shape and are shaped by media practices.

 

Faculty:

 

Faculty in Media Studies include, in alphabetical order:

 

  • Sam Becker (Distinguished Professor Emeritus):

    Sam is The University of Iowa Foundation Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Communication Studies. He chairs the emeritus faculty and staff organization at the University, and still is called upon from various parts of the country for review and speaking engagements.

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  • Tim Havens (Associate Professor):

    Timothy Havens (Ph.D. Indiana University) has primary research interests in how worldwide cultural differences (race, gender, nation, age) shape the business practices of international television trade. His research has appeared in Critical Studies in Media Communication; Media, Culture & Society; and the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media. He is a former Senior Fulbright Scholar to Hungary, and is finishing work on a book project entitled Global Television Program Sales with British Film Institute Publishing's International Screen Studies series.

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  • Joy Hayes (Associate Professor) :

    Joy studies the cultural history of broadcasting in the United States and Mexico with a primary focus on the period 1930-1950. She investigates the role of radio broadcasting in cultural identity formation through the archival collections of broadcasting institutions (government agencies and commercial networks), the texts of radio programs (recordings and scripts), and the documents produced by and about radio audiences (fan letters and surveys). Some of her recent work examines the construction of whiteness in U.S. family drama programs of the late thirties and explores the impact of these radio shows on early television representations of "the American family." Her course offerings at the graduate level include the Cultural History of Radio, Nationalism as a Communication Process, Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, and Theories of Mass Communication.

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  • Kembrew McLeod (Associate Professor):

    Kembrew McLeod is an independent documentary filmmaker and a media studies scholar at the University of Iowa whose work focuses on both popular music and the cultural impact of intellectual property law. Associate Professor McLeod has written refereed journal articles on copyright and music, and has published two books on the subject: Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership and Intellectual Property Law (Lang, 2001) and Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity (Doubleday, 2005), which received the Oboler book award from the American Library Association. McLeod's documentary, Money For Nothing: Behind the Business of Pop Music (2000), was programmed at a variety of film festivals, including the 2002 South By Southwest Film Festival and the 2002 New England Film and Video Festival, where it received the Rosa Luxemburg Award for Social Consciousness. He is currently working on a feature length documentary about digital sampling titled Copyright Criminals: This is a Sampling Sport, as well as a second documentary, Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property, which focuses on free speech and fair use. He is an occasional music journalist whose pieces have appeared in Rolling Stone, Mojo, Spin, The Village Voice and the New Rolling Stone Album Guide (Fireside, 2005). Additionally, McLeod was involved in Carrie McLaren's traveling “Illegal Art” show, which traveled to New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., and was hosted by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Artist Gallery in 2003. His scholarly and creative work can be accessed at kembrew.com.

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  • John Durham Peters (A. Craig Baird Professor in Communication Studies):

    John is interested in media and cultural history, communication and social theory, and understanding communication in its broad historical, legal, philosophical, religious, and technological context. He teaches large lecture undergraduate classes such as Core Concepts in Communication Studies and Media and Society, and smaller undergraduate courses such as Case Studies in Transnational Media. At the graduate level, he teaches seminars on critical theory, the history of mass communication theory, media and modernity, pragmatism, the public sphere, and transnational media.

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  • Rita Zajacz (Assistant Professor):

    Rita (Ph.D., Indiana University) studies the relationship between communications policy and international relations from a historical perspective, with a special emphasis on the strategic uses of early point-to-point communications technologies in Britain and in the United States. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media. She is currently working on a project analyzing the process of hegemonic transition in wireless telegraphy.

 

Courses:

Like the department’s other graduate programs, the MS program has a strong interdisciplinary flavor. Students draw not only on allied areas in the department but on fields across the University, including American Studies, Cinema and Comparative Literature, History, Journalism and Mass Communication, Political Science, POROI, Sociology, and Women’s Studies.

 

Current graduate courses in Media Studies includes:

  • Theories of Mass Communication
  • Critical Television Studies
  • The Public Sphere
  • Nationalism as a Communication Process
  • Global Media Seminar