Faculty Profiles

Elizabeth Nathanson

Associate Professor, Media & Communication
Media & Communication
484-664-4010

[email protected]

image of faculty member

Education

  • Ph.D., M.A., Northwestern University
  • B.A., Haverford College

Teaching Interests

I teach courses in popular culture, gender and media, television history and celebrity studies. 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 fashion blog? What kinds of people do we see? What kinds of activities are celebrated? Who has power and who does not? 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, Scholarship or Creative/Artistic Interests

My research is focused on 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. To this end, I study media about women with the goal to analyze how femininity and gender inequalities are recreated in popular culture. While I approach these texts with the perspective that they reflect dominant, mainstream beliefs, I also believe strongly in respecting, not denigrating, 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 such as “30 Minute Meals,” 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. My research is particularly informed by my experiences in the classroom. I have also edited a collection of essays about teaching film and media studies at liberal arts colleges.

  • Feminist Media Studies
  • Media & Society

Williams Award for Research by a Junior Faculty Member

Selected Publications

Nathanson, Elizabeth. Docalogue, "Public Gaslighting and Family Privacy (1 August, 2021). https://docalogue.com/allen-v-farrow/

Nathanson, Elizabeth. "Ageing On and Off the Red Carpet: Joan Rivers, Celebrity Culture and Postfeminist Television." Celebrity Studies 12:1 (2021), 51-66.

Nathanson, Elizabeth. “Sweet Sisterhood: Cupcakes as Sites of Feminized Consumption and Production.” In Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early 21st Century, edited by Elena Levine, 249-267. Urbana, IL: Indiana University Press, 2015.

Nathanson, Elizabeth. “She Works Hard for the Money/Man/Shoes/Herself/Her Sisters...” Antenna (27 October, 2015). http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2015/10/27/she- works-hard-for-the-money/

Nathanson, Elizabeth. “Dressed for Economic Distress: Blogging and the ‘New’ Pleasures of Fashion.” In Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity, edited by Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, 137-160. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

Nathanson, Elizabeth and Carol Donelan. “Teaching Film and Media Studies at Liberal Arts Colleges.” In Cinema Journal/Teaching Media Teaching Dossier Vol. 2 (Spring 2014), edited by Elizabeth Nathanson and Carol Donelan. http://www.teachingmedia.org/teaching-film-media-studies-liberal-arts-colleges-cinema- journal-teaching-dossier-vol-2-2-spring-2014/

Nathanson, Elizabeth. Television and Postfeminist Housekeeping: No Time for Mother. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Nathanson, Elizabeth. “As Easy as Pie: Cooking Shows, Domestic Efficiency, and Postfeminist Temporality.” Television and New Media 10:4 (July 2009), 311-330.

Selected Presentations

“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.

“Bee’s Sting: Feminist Anger on Nighttime Cable Television.” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Toronto, Canada, 2018. 

“The Labor of Unruly Celebrity: Nostalgia for Authentic Stardom in Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago, IL, 2017.

“Styling the Self: Fashion Blogging and Fixing the Feminine Image.” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Seattle, Washington, 2014.

“Revisiting the Politics of Visibility in the Classroom: Teaching Gender Studies for Social Justice.” Union for Democratic Communications, San Francisco, California, 2013.

“Doing Time: Women and Housework on Contemporary American Television." Board
 of Observers Annual Fall Breakfast, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA, October 2013.

“It’s Time for Lunch: Post-Network Daytime Television and Post-Feminist Housework.” Console-ing Passions Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, 2012.

“Workshop: Teaching Film and Media Studies at Liberal Arts Colleges.” (Chair and Panelist) Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Boston, Massachusetts, 2012.

“Crafts on Lifestyle Television: Postfeminist Representations of Tasteful Free Time.” Cinema Studies Colloquium. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, November 2012.

“Dressed for Economic Distress: Blogging and the ‘New’ Pleasures of Fashion.” Gendering the Recession: Women and Work Today, a one-day symposium. Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dublin, Ireland, April 2012.


Go Back to Search >>