Graduate Speaker Series

Tuesday, October 24

4 - 4:50 p.m.

Annenberg Hall, Room 1H

About the Lecture

Professor Carolyn Kitch will discuss her current book project, Mediating Women’s Lives: Popular Feminism and Public Memory, which brings together her research and teaching interests in gender studies, memory studies, and media studies.  

Over the past decade, a growing number of media texts have reexamined feminism’s past and have regarded present circumstances as historically important events that should be remembered in the future. Exploring case studies from journalism, film, television, podcasts, tourism, and public history, Kitch proposes that such narratives are beginning to disrupt patterns of cultural memory construction that for so long have forgotten women’s history and obscured women’s roles in public life. This promise is fueled both by current activism and by structural changes in the media industries, including the rising creative power of women media-makers. 

About the Author

Carolyn Kitch is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Journalism at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication. She also has been a faculty fellow in the Center for the Humanities at Temple. She has authored, co-authored, or co-edited five books: Front Pages, Front Lines: Media and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage (University of Illinois Press, 2020), co-edited with Linda Steiner and Brooke Kroeger; Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past (Penn State University Press, 2012); Journalism in a Culture of Grief (Routledge, 2008), co-authored with Janice Hume; Pages from the Past: History and Memory in American Magazines (University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media (University of North Carolina Press, 2001).