Mary Celeste Kearney

On Research Leave for the 2024 Calendar Year

Associate Professor, Television and Film Studies

Concurrent Faculty, Gender Studies
Concurrent Faculty, American Studies
Faculty Affiliate, Initiative on Race and Resilience

Specialties

History, Theory, and Criticism

Research Interests

film, television, popular music, gender, youth, identity, cultural studies

Biography

Professor Kearney’s research focuses primarily on gender, youth, and media culture. She recently won an NEH fellowship to complete her second monograph, which examines narrative, visual, and sound design in early representations of American teenage girlhood. Tentatively titled "Designing and Redesigning the Junior Miss: The First Wave of U.S. Teen-Girl Entertainment," Kearney's book will be published by the University of Texas Press. She is also editing the second edition of The Craft of Criticism with Michael Kackman. Professor Kearney’s essays have appeared in Camera Obscura, Cultural Studies, Feminist Formations, Feminist Media Studies, the Journal for Children and Media, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Her essay, "Sparkle: Luminosity and Post-Girl Power Media" (Continuum 29.2) won the 2016 Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Professor Kearney is the academic editor for the book series Routledge Research in Gender, Sexuality, and Media, as well as an editorial board member for Feminist Media Studies. She helped to found Girls Rock Michiana, a program hosted by The Music Village and devoted to inspiring girls' creativity, confidence, and collaboration via music.

Schedule an appointment with Professor Kearney

Representative Publications, Performances, and Creative Works

Co-editor: Special IGSA@ND issue of Girlhood Studies (Berghahn, 2021, with Angeletta KM Gourdine and Shauna Pomerantz)

Author: Girls Make Media (Routledge, 2006).

Author: Gender and Rock (Oxford, 2017).

Editor: The Gender and Media Reader (Routledge, 2011).

Editor: Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls' Media Culture, vols. 1 & 2 (Peter Lang, 2011 & 2018, with Morgan Blue).

Co-editor: The Craft of Criticism: Critical Media Studies in Practice (Routledge, 2018, with Michael Kackman).