Elizabeth Nathanson
Contact: [email protected]
Education
- Ph.D., M.A. Northwestern University
- B.A. Haverford College
Teaching Interests
I teach courses in American popular culture, gender and media, television history and celebrity studies. I enjoy exploring questions with students like: How do we take the stories and images found on the screens that constantly surround us and better understand how they shape our world? What can we learn about the values held by our culture from analyzing such seemingly frivolous popular culture artifacts such as a reality TV show or “get ready with me” TikTok? What kinds of people do we see? What kinds of activities are celebrated? The media are all around us. Whether we love the media or hate the media, I believe it is our responsibility to understand how the media inform our lives.
I believe teaching media & communication studies is an engaging collaboration between people, ideas and popular culture. Teaching at Muhlenberg encourages such collaboration through small, discussion-oriented classes and student-led discovery. In my classes we watch, read about and create media, all with an eye towards becoming more critical media consumers and producers.
Research and Scholarship
I research representations of femininity in popular culture. I study popular media, namely texts that appear to represent historical and sociological conditions that also appeal to audiences. I am driven to analyze how femininity and gender inequalities are recreated in popular culture and how they speak to inequalities that exist in culture. While I approach these texts with the perspective that they reflect dominant, mainstream beliefs, I also believe strongly in respecting the unique pleasures they offer and exploring the possibilities for resistance that those pleasures may contain.
Some of the topics I have written about include representations of housework on TV cooking programs, momfluencer culture, the depiction of women’s creative labor on fashion blogs and the rise and significance of cupcakes in popular culture. My scholarship is enriched by other disciplines, fields as diverse as media studies, film studies, sociology, economics, history and philosophy. I am most excited by research that is informed by my experiences in the classroom and have had the privilege of working with multiple Muhlenberg research assistants on publications. I have also edited a collection of essays about teaching film and media studies at liberal arts colleges.
- Documentary Research
- Feminist Media Studies
- Media & Society
- Spc Top: Women Directors
- 2024 NEW COURSE DEVELOPMENT GRANT, Muhlenberg College
- 2022 FACULTY RESEARCH GRANT, Muhlenberg College
- 2021 ANTI-RACISM PEDAGOGY GRANT, Muhlenberg College
- 2020 NEW COURSE DEVELOPMENT GRANT, Muhlenberg College
- 2019 FACULTY RESEARCH GRANT, Muhlenberg College
- 2013 ROBERT C. WILLIAMS FACULTY AWARD, Muhlenberg College
Select Publications
“Woods, Prairies and Deserts: Pandemic Motherhood and Spacious White Retreat.” From Wine Moms to QAnon: The Violence at the Heart of White Women’s Wellness Culture, eds. Anna Mae Duane and Beth Marshall. (under contract at Fordham University Press)
“Book review of Producing Television: Television Work in the Age of Women’s Liberation, by Jennifer S. Clark (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2024.” Television and New Media 1-4(2024). DOI: 10.177/152764241287492
“Hope Wears a White Collar: RBG Memes and Signifying Intergenerational Resistance.” Networked Feminisms, ed. Shana MacDonald, Michelle MacArthur, Milena Radzikowska, and Brianna Wiens, (eds.) (Lexington Press, 2021).
“Public Gaslighting and Family Privacy” Docologue (August 2021).
https://docalogue.com/allen-v-
“A Grandma on the Red Carpet: Joan Rivers, Celebrity Culture and Postfeminist Television.” Celebrity Studies (2019), DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2019.1608839.
“End Goal? The Promises of the US Women’s Soccer Team” Flow Journal (27 July 2019).
http://www.flowjournal.org/
“Sweet Sisterhood: Cupcakes as Sites of Feminized Consumption and Production.” Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early 21st Century, Elena Levine (ed.) (Indiana University Press, 2015).
Television and Postfeminist Housekeeping: No Time for Mother. (New York: Routledge, 2013).
Select Presentations
"The Diplomat and Women’s Work In the Era of Streaming TV,” Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Atlanta, GA, 2026.
“Workshop: Finding Work-Work Balance: Integrating Teaching into Research and Vice Versa,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago, IL 2025.
“Feminist Syllabus Showcase,” Console-ing Passions, Bloomington, IN 2024
“Engaging Media: Experiential Learning as a Pedagogical Tool,” Union of Democratic
Communications, Philadelphia, PA 2023 (panel co-chair and participant)
“Workshop: Post-Roe Interventions: Media Scholar Responses to Contemporary Challenges on Reproductive Rights,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Denver, CO 2023.
“Woods, Prairies and Deserts: Pandemic Motherhood and Spacious White Retreat,”
American Studies Association Conference, New Orleans, LA 2022.
“Fungible Femininity: Physical, Self-Determination, and Home Video,” co-author with Hollis Griffin, Console-ing Passions, Orlando, FL 2022
“Silence and Better Things: Television and Grey Rocking as Feminist Creative Resistance,” American Studies Association Conference, Virtual, 2021.
“Elsa Is Everywhere! Postfeminist Princess Play,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Denver, 2020.
“Grappling with the Politics of Humorous Gifs,” LVAIC Digital Tools for Teaching and Learning, Bethlehem, PA 2019.
“Hope Wears a White Collar: RBG and Signifying Grandmotherly Resistance.” Popular Culture Association Conference, Washington DC, 2019.
“The ‘Relatable’ and Mobilizing Student Engagement with Televisual Representations.” Flow Conference, Austin, Texas, 2018.
“Bee’s Sting: Feminist Anger on Nighttime Cable Television.” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Toronto, Canada, 2018. (“Mad Women and Furious Men: Anger, Gender, and Contemporary Media Politics” panel chair)
Media & Communication
Contact: [email protected]