LOUISA STEIN
Assistant Professor

Head of TV/Film Critical Studies Program
TV/Film History, Theory

Office: COM 103
Phone: 594-6895
lstein@mail.sdsu.edu

I am a media studies scholar
dedicated to bridging theory, history, and practice.  My research explores audience engagement in contemporary and historical contexts.  I am currently working on two book projects; I am co-authoring a study of fan textual creativity in new media, with the working title Limits: New Media, Genre, and Fan Texts.  In this study, Kristina Busse and I explore the dynamics of fan fiction and art created and circulated through the tools of new media. I am also co-editing Watching Teen TV: Text and Culture with Sharon Ross.  This collection of essays traces the range of histories, meanings, and investments surrounding Teen TV, combining close textual analysis of teen television programs with explorations of production and industrial context, as well as with considerations of cultures of reception.

My dissertation, completed at NYU in 2006, reconfigures contemporary approaches to genre, as I argue that we can most fruitfully look at genre as discourse rather than category.  I make this case through case studies of the texts and producer and fan-authored metatexts surrounding Teen/Fantasy TV programs such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Smallville. 

My research explores unofficial authorship surrounding commercial media texts, including alternative interpretations such as queer readings—the topic of my two recent essays, “‘They Cavort, You Decide’:  Transgenericism, Queerness, and Fan Interpretation in Teen TV” (Spectator 25.2, Spring 2005) and “‘This Dratted Thing’: Fannish Storytelling through New Media” (Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays.  Eds. Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson.  McFarland, August 2006.)

While in New York, I taught a range of film, television, and new media studies courses at NYU in the department of Cinema Studies, at Queens College in the department of Media Studies, and at Hunter College in the department of Film and Media Studies.