Contributors

Matthew Bond is a graduate student in English at MTSU.

Barbara Ching is Associate Professor of English and director of the Humanities Center at the University of Memphis. She is the author of Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (Oxford University Press).

Joanna L. Di Mattia is currently immersed in a Ph.D, researching the shift toward anxious models of masculinity in the contemporary American cinema, in the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, Monash University.

Michael Dunne is professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. Where he teaches courses in American literature, Hawthorne, criticism, film, narratology, Calvinist humor, and popular culture. He is the author of four books, Metapop: Self Referentiality in Contemporary American Pop Culture (1992), Hawthorne's Narrative Strategies (1995), Intertextual Encounters in American Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture (2001), American Film Musical Themes and Forms (2004). With Dr. Sara Dunne, he edits Studies in Popular Culture.

Michael Epstein is associate professor at the Southwestern University College of Law, where he teaches courses on media and entertainment law.

Dennis Hall is Professor of English at the University of Louisville. He is the co-editor of The Greenwood Guide to American Popular Culture.

Eleanor Hersey teaches at Fresno Pacific University.

David Lavery is professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. The author of over forty essays and author/editor/co-editor of Late for the Sky: The Mentality of the Space Age (1992), Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks (1994), ‘Deny All Knowledge’: Reading The X-Files (1996), Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2002), Teleparody: Predicting/Preventing the TV Discourse of Tomorrow (2002), and This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos.

Betty Lee made her concert debut as a pianist at the age of nine and won over thirty piano competitions around the world. She is currently studying microbiology at the University of Florida and continues to appear as a soloist on concert stages across the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Marc Leverette is a doctoral student in communication at Rutgers University. He is the author of Wrestling Nation: The Myth of the Mat in American Popular Culture (Mellen 2003).

David Marc is visiting professor of Television-Radio-Film in the Newhouse School of Syracuse University. The author of such books as Demographic Vistas, Comic Visions, Bonfire of the Humanities: Television, Subliteracy, and Long-Term Memory Loss, with Robert J. Thompson he is the co-author of a forthcoming history of television to be published by Blackwell.

Amy McWilliams is a doctoral candidate in English at Texas A & M.

Geoffrey O’Brien is the author of Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the Twentieth Century and Castaways of the Image Planet: Movies, Show Business, Public Spectacle. He directs the Library of America.

Jimmie L. Reeves is associate professor of mass communication at Texas Tech University. In addition to articles on subjects ranging from Mr. T to The X-Files, he is the co-author of Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (1994).

Mark C. Rogers is assistant professor of communication at Walsh University. His previous publications include collaborative pieces on Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and The Sopranos.

Jon Stratton is professor of cultural studies at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia. He is the author of Coming Out Jewish, The Desirable Body: Cultural Fetishism and the Erotics of Consumption, and other books.

Elke van Cassel (MA) graduated cum laude from the American Studies program at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in 1998. She spent her senior year at the University of California, Berkeley, where she did most of the research for her master’s thesis, an intercultural comparison of the way Dutch and American viewers watch and perceive the TV-sitcom Seinfeld, and the way they experience “TV flow.” Since her graduation, she has worked on her dissertation, an examination of the impact and influence of The Reporter--an American public interest magazine, published from 1949 till 1968--on American political, social, and cultural life during the 1950s and 1960s. She is a member of the board of the Netherlands American Studies Association (NASA).

Bill Wyman writes on the arts for Salon.com.