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Northwestern School of Communication

Lynn Spigel

Frances Willard Professor of Screen Cultures; Director of Graduate Studies, Screen Cultures
CV
Media history and theory with an interdisciplinary and feminist focus. Areas include: television history; feminist TV and film studies; media technologies and design; science fiction studies, theories of space and place; media and everyday life. Currently researching streaming TV and writing on digital homes and domestic technologies.

Department

Radio/Television/Film

Area(s) of Expertise

Cinema-Film, Feminist theory, Media analysis, Television
Lynn Spigel

Lynn Spigel is the Frances Willard Chair of Screen Cultures in the Department of Radio/TV/Film. Her books include TV Snapshots: An Archive of Everyday Life; TV By Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television; Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs; and Make Room Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. She has edited numerous books and anthologies, lectured internationally, and has published in a range of interdisciplinary journals. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the ICA Book Fellows Award. She writes and teaches about the history of film, television, and digital media, with a focus on gender, technology, and media's relation to everyday life.

Education

  • PhD UCLA, Film and Television

Publications

  • TV Snapshots: An Archive of Everyday Life (Duke University Press, 2022)
  • TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (University of Chicago Press, 2009).
  • Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Duke University Press, 2001)
  • Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 1992)
  • Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology and Social Space (co-edited, University of Minnesota Press, 2010)
  • Feminist Television Reader (co-edited, Oxford University Press, 2007 and second edition 2010)
  • Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (co-edited, Duke University Press, 2005).
  • The Revolution Wasn't Televised: Sixties Television and Social Transition (co-edited, Routledge, 1997)
  • Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer (co-edited, Minnesota University Press, 1992, reprinted by Duke University Press)
  • Close Encounters: Feminism and Science Fiction (co-edited, University of Minnesota Press and reprinted by Duke University Press, 1991)
  • Recent Articles in Harvard Design Magazine, Screen, Cinemas, Cinema Journal, Public Culture
  • Work translated into French, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Polish.

Awards

  • Guggenheim Fellowship
  • International Communication Association Book Fellows Award
  • IKKM Senior Fellowship
  • Bauhaus University
  • Selected and interviewed as Field Pioneer by Society for Cinema and Media Studies (Field Notes)
  • Choice Award (Books in Communication)
  • Honorable Mention (2nd place) SCMS Kitty Kovacs book award
  • Fulbright Lecturer
  • Mellon Lecturer
  • Keynote Speaker and Lectures:
    • Screen Conference in Glasgow
    • University of Amsterdam
    • Stockholm University
    • Warwick University
    • Whitney Museum of Art
    • Museum of Modern Art
    • University of Paris (2)
    • University of Pennsylvania
    • Harvard University
    • UC Berkeley
    • Princeton University
    • Stanford University
    • University of Buenos Aries

Courses

  • TV and Media Theory
  • Science Fiction Film and Television
  • Media Historiography
  • Television History
  • Girl Culture
  • Media and Everyday Life
  • Television and Art
  • Cold War Visual Culture
  • Cultural Theory, Media and Theories of Social Space