Sharon R. Mazzarella, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Television-Radio has been named editor of the new book series Mediated Youth to be published by Peter Lang Publishing.
Grounded in cultural studies, the two or three books published in this series each year will study the cultures, artifacts, and media of children, tweens, teens, and college-aged youth. Whether studying television, popular music, fashion, sports, toys, the Internet, self-publishing, leisure, clubs, school cultures/activities, film, dance, language, tie-in merchandising, concerts, subcultures, or other forms of popular culture, books in this series will go beyond the dominant paradigm of traditional studies of the effects of media/culture on youth. Instead, books in this series will endeavor to understand the complex relationship between youth and popular culture, and, whenever possible, will include the voices of youth themselves.
Mazzarella's role as series editor will be to recruit authors to contribute books to the series, review book proposals and manuscripts submitted for publication in the series, take final editorial control over books in the series, and advise the publisher on marketing and promotion of the books.
Sharon Mazzarella teaches courses in youth culture, media effects, and media studies. Her research focuses on youth culture and mass media, specifically the representational politics of mediated portrayals of youth. She is founding, lead coeditor of the journal Popular Communication (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) and has published articles in Popular Music and Society, the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, and Communication Research. She is coeditor of Growing Up Girls: Popular Culture and the Construction of Identity (1999, Peter Lang) and has guest-edited special issues of the journals Popular Music and Society and Mass Communication and Society.
Mazzarella's research has been published in a variety of anthologies including the recently-published and prestigious Companion to Media Studies (2003, Blackwell). Her work has been presented at a range of academic conferences including the International Communication Association, the Broadcast Education Association, the American Studies Association, the National Women's Studies Association, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and the National Communication Association.
She has served on the board of the International Communication Association and as chair of the Popular Communication Division of that organization. Her forthcoming book is Girl Wide Web: Girls, the Internet, and the Negotiation of Identity (Peter Lang, 2005).
Contributed by Melissa Gattine
