Janet Staiger Lecture in Gender and Sexuality Presents Dr. Rebecca Wanzo: "On Black Love Objects: Media Commonsense and Linked Fate"

The Department of Radio-Television-Film is thrilled to have Dr. Rebecca Wanzo as our guest speaker for our annual Janet Staiger Lecture in Gender and Sexuality. 

Speaker Bio:

Rebecca Wanzo is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Storytelling (SUNY, 2009) and The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (NYU, 2020). The Content of Our Caricature won the Katherine Singer Kovac Book Prize from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the Comics Studies Society, and the Best Scholarly/Academic Work from the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. Her research interests include African American literature and culture, feminist theory, cultural studies, media studies, and cartoon and comic studies. She has published essays in venues such as American Literature, Camera Obscura, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Film Quarterly, as well as numerous other academic journals, edited collections, and popular media outlets. 

Dr. Wanzo is a professor of the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University. 

About the Janet Staiger Lecture in Gender and Sexuality
Beginning in 1994, faculty members in the Department of Radio-Television-Film have annually organized the visit and lecture by guest scholars and filmmakers to emphasize our critical focus on gender and sexuality in film and TV, including feminist and queer media theory, criticism, and production. World-class scholars and filmmakers continue to bring diversity of thinking in humanities and social science research and innovative practices in fiction and documentary filmmaking, inspiring all of us to reach further and grow together in our work.

The series has been endowed by Janet Staiger, the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor Emeritus of Communication and Professor Emeritus of Women's and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Staiger is a pioneer in film studies with ground-breaking research and publications in authorship theory, modes of production, cultural and political issue of representation, genre theory, the historical reception of cinema and television, and historiographical issues in writing media histories.