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The Critics of Popular Culture

From A through L
Who they are, where they teach, what they write about on the subject, and sometimes, what they look like. This
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The Critics, in alphabetical order

Robert C. Allen. James Logan Godfrey Professor of American Studies,

History, and Communication Studies. Dept of American Studies,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (Ph.D. in Film and
Television, University of Iowa). Dr. Allen's teaching and research interests
include film and media history , media criticism, cultural history, and the
history of popular entertainment.

He has published books on soap operas, film historiography, television

criticism, and burlesque. These include: Speaking of Soap Operas;
Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture; Channels of
Discourse (editor);

Nancy Armstrong, Program in Modern Culture and Media, Brown

University. Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Comparative Literature,
English, Modern Culture and Media, and Women's Studies. Publications:
Fiction In The Age Of Photography (contracted for publication with
Harvard University Press). with Leonard Tennenhouse. The Imaginary
Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, And The Origins Of Personal Life
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Desire And Domestic
Fiction: A Political History Of The Novel (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987
 Stanley Arnonowitz Director Center for Cultural Studies The Graduate
Center City University of New York

Publications which discuss popular culture include False Promises (1973)

Roll Over Beethoven (199

Houston Baker, Professor of English, Duke University. He has published a number of

scholarly works including: Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American
Women's Writing and Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993)

Jean Baudrillard is Professor Emeritus, University of Paris. A

famous social philosopher and "hyperrealist," he is a leading
critic of the postmodern culture, the economy of
communication, and the media system. Author of System of
Objects; Consumer Society; Critique of the Political Economy
of the Sign; The Mirror of Production; Symbolic Exchange
and Death; On Seduction; Simulacra and Simulation; Fatal
Strategies; America; The Transparency of Evil; Cool
Memories; Card illusionnes oppose pas à la realité.

John Berger is a novelist, screenwriter and art critic who is perhaps most famous
as the writer-host of Ways of Seeing, a ground-breaking four part television series
(and book) about art and culture that first aired in the United Kingdom in 1971.
Not long after that series, Berger moved permanently to a small village in the
French Alps where he began work on "Into Their Labours," a series of stories on
the lives of peasants.
Sven Birkerts is director of students and core faculty writing
instructor in the Master of Fine Arts Program at Bennington
College as well as an instructor in Emerson College's Master of
Fine Arts Writing Program. He is the author of The Gutenberg
Elegies

Patrick Brantlinger, Dept of English, Indiana University. (Ph.D., 1968,

Harvard University). 19th-century English literature. Victorian Studies. Mass
media. Literary and cultural theory. Author of Bread and Circuses:Theories of
Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), on the
history of criticism of mass culture from Classical Rome to the present, as
well as discussions of mass culture in a book about cultural studies, and a
book on the fear of reading in the nineteenth century

Leo Braudy Dept of English, USC. Leo S. Bing Professor Areas of Interest:
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century; Film and Popular Culture (Ph.D. Yale
University).. Publications include: Narrative Form in History and Fiction:
Hume, Fielding, and Gibbon, 1970 Native Informant: Essays on Film, Fiction
and Popular Culture,1992 The World in a Frame: What We See in Films, 1976;
second edition, 1984 The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, 1986;
second edition, 1997 Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 5th
edition, 1998

Matei Calinescu, Professor, English, Indiana University. (Ph.D., 1972, University

of Cluj, Romania). 19th-and 20th-century European literature (symbolism,
decadence, modernism, the avant-garde, and postmodernism). Literary theory and
particularly theories of reading. Literature and politics. Theories of mass culture and
the aesthetics of kitsch.
James Carey Professor in the Journalism College, Columbia University.

Author of Communication as Culure: Essays on Media and Society 1989

Stanley Cavell, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Harvard, is the author of

many books of philosophy and three books on film and philosophy--The
World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: Viking
1971).Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage,
(1984), and Contesting Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman
(1996) He received his A.B. in music from the University of California,
Berkeley, and his Ph.D., in philosophy, from Harvard. He was Walter M.
Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard, and
then Professor Emeritus in 1997.

John G. Cawelti, (now retired). Formerly Professor, English, University

of Kentucky, and before that, Professor, English, University of Chicago.

(PhD - Iowa)

Areas of Specialty: Twentieth-Century American Literature, Modern

Literature, American Studies, Popular Culture, Popular Fiction .

Author of Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press,1976)

The Six Gun Mystique

among other books and articles on popular culture.

 Jim Cullen, author of The Art of Democracy: A Concise History of Popular
Culture in America, teaches in the Dept of Expository Writing, Harvard Univ.

Daniel Czitrom, Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College,

South Hadley Mass., is the author of a book on the history of
communications criticism, Media and the American Mind: From Morse
to McLuhan

Mike Davis is the author of The City of Quartz

Michael Denning, Professor of American Studies at Yale

University, and the author of Mechanic Accents (on the popular
fiction of the 19th century) and

The Cultural Front: the laboring of American Culture in the

Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996),
Morris Dickstein, Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center, and
Professor of English, Queens College, CUNY, and author of

The Gates of Eden

and

Ariel Dorfman, Duke University, Program in Literature.Walter Hines

Page Research Professor of Literature and Latin American Studies.
(Degree: Licenciatura in Comparative Literature from the Universidad
de Chile, Santiago, 1965). His major publications on popular culture are

How to Read Donald Duck (in collaboration with Armand Mattlelart,

1971),

The Empire's Old Clothes:What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and other
innocent heroes do to our minds (New York: Pantheon, 1983)

Ann Douglas. Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia

University, and the author of The Feminization of American Culture and
Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s.

E
 Umberto Eco.Novelist and critic, born in Alessandria, Italy in 1929. He
studied at Turin University, has taught semiotics at the University of
Bologne for many years, and published several important works on the
subject. His novel Il nome della rosa (1980, The Name of the Rose), an
intellectual detective story, achieved instant fame, and attracted much
critical attention; it was filmed in 1986. Later novels are Foucault's
Pendulum (trans, 1988) and L'isola del giorno prima (1994, The Island of
the Day Before). He has published a number of major essays on popular
culture including a notable one on James Bond

Stuart Ewen Prof of Media Studies, Dept of Communications, Hunter

College CUNY and Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center. Author of All
Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture 1988.
Author With Elizabeth Ewen of Captains of Consciousness: Advertising
and the Social Roots of the Consmer Culture 1976, and Channels of
Desire: Mass Images and the shaping of American Consciousness 1982

Jane Feuer is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh

and is the author of The Hollywood Musical ( second edition , 1993) and
Seeing through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism. (Duke University
Press,1995).

S.H. John Fiske Professor, Emeritus, Department of Communication

Arts,University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison. Publications include:Media
Matters. University of Minnesota Press 1994. Understanding Popular Culture.
Unwin Hyman (Routledge) 1989.Reading the Popular. Unwin Hyman (now
Routledge) 1989.Television Culture. Methuen (now Routledge) 1987..
G
Neal Gabler is the author of Life: The Movie, and An Empire of their Own: How
the Jews Invented Hollywood

Jane M. Gaines Duke University English Dept.

(Ph.D., Northwestern, 1982), has co-edited
Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body
(Routledge, 1990) and has published work on
feminist film theory, consumer culture,
entertainment law, and African American film . She
has recently edited Classical Hollywood Narratives:
The Paradigm Wars (Duke, 1992) and published
Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the
Law (University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

Herbert Gans. Robert Lynd Professor of

Sociology, Columbia.( Ph.D. in planning
and sociology from the University of
Pennsylvania in 1957).

Gans is the author of nine books,

including The Levittowners, Deciding
What's News, Popular Culture and High
Culture,, and The War Against the Poor:
The Underclass and Antipoverty Policy.

He is the author of numerous

monographs and journal articles, and
from 1971 to 1978 he was film critic for
the journal Social Policy.
 Marjorie Garber, Professor, English Dept, Harvard;
Director, Center for Literary and Cultural Studies. ( Ph.D.
1969 Yale). Selected Works: Symptoms of Culture (1998);
Dog Love (1996); Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism
of Everyday Life (1995); Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and
Cultural Anxiety (1992);ed., Secret Agents: The Rosenberg
Case, McCarthyism and Fifties America (1995); ed., Media
Spectacles (1993).

Louis Henry Gates, Professor and Director of African-American Studies at

Harvard. Author of many books including one which connects to popular
culture, The Signifying Monkey

George Gerbner, retired, was the Dean of the Annenberg School of

Communications and the University of Pennsylvania, and is the
founding editor of the Journal of Communication. His "cultivation
theory" about the ways that entertainment influence people, is a major
contribution to the study of the field.
Henry Giroux Prof at Penn State, is the author of Disturbing Pleasures
Routledge 1994 and 1989 Popular Culture, Scholing, and Everyday Life NY
Bergin and Garvey

Todd Gitlin, Professor.of Communications, NYU. ( Ph.D. 1977, California

(Berkeley). Author of The Twilight of Common Dreams; The Sixties: Years of
Hope, Days of Rage; Inside Prime Time; The Whole World Is Watching; and other
books. Also holds appointments in the Departments of Journalism and Mass
Communication and Sociology. Research interests include contemporary media and
globalization.

George Grella, Associate Professor of English, University of Rochester, is the

author of several important essays on detective fiction

Lawrence Grossberg Morris Davis Professor of

Communication Studies at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and Chair of the Executive
Committee of the University Program in Cultural Studies,
Lawrence Grossberg is one of the leading exponents of
Cultural Studies in the United States. His current work
focuses on globalization, America's war against children,
and the modernist foundations of cultural theory. His
books include It's a Sin: Essays on Postmodernism,
Politics and Culture (1988); We Gotta Get Out Of This
Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture
(1992); Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays in Popular
Culture (1997); Bringing It All Back Home: Essays in
Cultural Studies (1997); and MediaMaking (1998). He is
co-editor of several books--including Cultural Studies
(1991), Sound and Vision (1993) and The Audience and its
Landscapes (1996)--as well as the journal Cultural
Studies.

bell hooks, Distinguished Professor of English at City College, New

York City. (Educated at Stanford and UC Santa Cruz).

publications in popular culture include Reel to Real: Race, Sex and

Class at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1996)

Tony Hilfer, Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin, and the author of
The Crime Novel

Andreas Huyssen, Professor of German, Columbia University. One of his books,

Across the Great Divide, concerns popular culture.

I
J
Fred Jameson, Program in Literature, Duke, is William A. Lane, Jr.,
Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of Romance Studies
(French), and Chair of The Literature Program. Ph.D. from Yale in 1959..
Author of many influential essays on mass culture including "Ideology
and Utopia" in the first issue of the journal Social Text (1979). His most
recent books include Late Marxism (1990), Signatures of the Visible
(1990), Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991),
The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), and Seeds of Time (1994).

Henry Jenkins, Director of Film & Media Studies,MIT, has a Ph.D. in

Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.His books
include "What Made Pistachio Nuts": Early Sound Comedy and the
Vaudeville Aesthetic, Classical Hollywood Comedy and Textual Poachers:
Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Jenkins has published articles on a
diverse range of topics relating to film, television and popular culture. His
most recent essays include work on Star Trek, WWF Wrestling, Nintendo
Games, and Dr. Seuss

Prof. Joli Jensen, University of Tulsa, Department of

Communication. Her first book, Redeeming Modernity:
Contradictions in Media Criticism, (Sage 1990) analyzes
how the media are blamed for the perceived ills of modern
life. Her second book, Creating the Nashville Sound:
Authenticity, Commercialization and Country Music
(Vanderbilt 1998) explores how and why cultural genre
change, in relation to concerns about culture and
commerce. Her third book Is Art Good For Us? Beliefs
about High Culture in American Life (Rowman &
Littlefield 2002) addresses the ways in which the arts
have been imagined to be socially redemptive.
Sut Jhally Professor, U Mass Dept of Communications. PhD Simon Fraser.
Critical cultural stdies, political economy of media and culture, media theory,
advertising and commercial clture, sport and media. Author of The Codes of
Advertising, and editor of Cultural Politics in Contemporary America (with
Ian Angus).

Producer of a video critical of the content of MTV images.

Garth Jowett is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Houston

and the author of several major studies of the film industry.

Michael Kammen, Professor of History at Cornell University and the author of

numerous books, including American Culture American Tastes: Social Change and
the 20th Century. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1999.

John Kasson is professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel

Hill, and the author of Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century
Douglas Kellner, Professor, Graduate School of Education,
UCLA, and (formerly) Professor, Dept of Philosophy, University
of Texas at Austin. PhD in Philosophy. Author of numerous books
on mass culture, film, and television inc Television and the Crisis
of Democracy, the author of a book on Herbert Marcuse, and the
editor of the papers of Herbert Marcuse

Jackson Lears, Prof of History at Rutgers, PhD in American

Studies from Yale, 1978. and author of Fables of Abundance: a
Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic
Books, October 1994), 512 pp. The Power of Culture: Essays in
American History, eds. T.J. Jackson Lears and Richard Wightman
Fox (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993),
289 pp. The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American
History, 1880-1980, eds. T.J. Jackson Lears and Richard
Wightman Fox (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 292 pp. Translated
into Japanese and published by Keiso Shobo, Tokyo, 1984. No
Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of
American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 375
pp., reissued in paperback by University of Chicago Press, Spring
1994.

Lawrence Levine. Professor of History at George Mason University, and

formerly Professor of History at U C Berkeley. Author of Highbrow
Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1988, as well as numerous essays on popular
culture.

George Lipsitz, Professor and Chair, Dept of Ethnic Studies, UC San

Diego. glipsitz@weber.ucsd.edu 20th Century African-American History;
Urban Culture and Structure; Transnational Culture. Author of Book on
popular culture,Time Passages.
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