Melissa A. Ames

Melissa Ames is a Profesesor of English & the Director of English Education at Eastern Illinois University specializing in Media Studies, Television Scholarship, Popular Culture, and Feminist Theory. She teaches courses in these fields, as well as in Composition and English Education. Her work has been published in a variety of anthologies and journals, ranging in topic from Television Study, Internet Studies, and Fandom to American Literature, Feminist Media, and Pedagogy. Her most recent publications include her books, Women and Language: Essays on Gendered Communication Across Media (2011), Time in Television Narrative: Exploring Temporality in 21st Century Programming (2012), How Pop Culture Shapes the Stages of a Woman's Life (2016), Small Screen, Big Feels: Television & Cultural Anxiety in the 21st Century (2020); chapters in Grace Under Pressure: Grey’s Anatomy Uncovered (2008), Writing the Digital Generation (2010), Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media, and the Twilight Saga (2010), Fabricating the Body (2014), The Vampire Diaries Collection (2015), Manufacturing Phobias (2015); and articles in the Journal of Dracula Studies (2010), The High School Journal (2013), The Journal of Popular Culture (2014), and Pedagogy (2017). To read her recent essays on television and popular culture, visit her blog: http://smallscreenscholar.blogspot.com/