Eastern Illinois University :: Eastern Illinois University :: English Department

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Phone: (217) 581-2428
Fax: (217) 581-7209
Email Dana Ringuette, Department Chair

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Faculty and Administration

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Dr. Melissa Ames

Assistant Professor of English

Office: 3821 - Coleman Hall
Phone:
Email: mames@eiu.edu

Melissa Ames's Vita

Melissa Ames completed her Doctor of Philosophy degree in 2007 at Wayne State University in 20th Century American Literature and Culture specializing in media studies, television scholarship, popular culture, and feminist theory. Her previous degrees – a Master of Arts in Education from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Arts from University of Detroit-Mercy – shape her interest in merging academic media scholarship and pedagogy.
Her work has been published in a variety of anthologies and journals and ranges in topic from Television Study, New Media, and Fandom to American Literature and Feminist Art. She is excited about her recent and upcoming publications which include her books Women & Language: Gendered Communication Across Media (McFarland, 2011) and Time in Television Narrative: Exploring 21st Century Programming (University Press of Mississippi, 2012); chapters in Grace Under Pressure: Grey’s Anatomy Uncovered (Cambridge Scholars, 2008), Writing (and) the Digital Generation: Essays on How Interactive Digital Media is Changing Rhetoric and Writing (McFarland Press, 2009), and Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media, and the Twilight Saga (Lang's Mediated Youth Series, 2010); as well as articles in The Journal of Dracula Studies (2011), The Encylcopedia of Women & Popular Culture (2013), and The Journal of Popular Culture (2014).

Education

PhD, Wayne State University
MA, University of Michigan
BA, University of Detroit Mercy

Research

Cultural studies, media studies, popular culture, television scholarship, twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature, pedagogy, postmodern and feminist theory.