About
Olivia Stowell's research and writing focus on race, labor, and gender in U.S. contemporary television, film, and popular culture.
Her dissertation project, tentatively titled Reality Reckoning: Race and Reality TV After 2020, explores discursive formations of race and racism as they relate to gender, work, genre, and regulation in post-2020 U.S. reality television. Reality Reckoning historicizes post-2020 reality TV both as a form and as an industry practice to understand its engagements with identity, politics, and power, working at the juncture of cultural studies and political economy.
In both her research and her pedagogy, Olivia is committed to frameworks that center justice, equity, and accessibility.
Peer-Reviewed Academic Articles
"Re-heating the ‘First’ Thanksgiving: The Thanksgiving Episode as Settler Colonial Narrative" in Critical Studies in Television
“It’s Top Chef, Not a Personality Contest: Grammars of Stereotype, Neoliberal Logics of Personhood, and the Performance of the Racialized Self in Top Chef: New York” in New Review of Film & Television
“There’s Certainly a Lot of History Here, but We’re Here to Roast Oysters: Afterlives of Transatlantic Exchange in Top Chef: Charleston” in Television & New Media
Selected Public Writing
"A Show About People Like Them" in the Los Angeles Review of Books
“Pre-Recession Bliss, or Ignorance: Laguna Beach at 20” in Public Books
“Let Down by Television” in Mid Theory Collective
"Suspicion, as Seen on TV" in Post45 Contemporaries
"To Be Real: On Emily Nussbaum’s “Cue the Sun!” in the Los Angeles Review of Books
"You Better Work, Ben: On Labor and Ben Stiller" in ASAP/J
"Pilgrimage to Pumptinis" in Avidly
“Family No Longer Sustains: On Michael Szalay’s Second Lives” in the Los Angeles Review of Books
“The Confessional Edge" in ASAP/J
“Time to Be Real?: Nostalgia, Authenticity, and the Digital Return to the Everyday” in FLOW Journal
"Our Bodies, Our Time Machines" in Novel Dialogue
"Introduction: Dark Academia" in Post45 Contemporaries
"The Time Warp, Again?" in Post45 Contemporaries
"Adriana's Abs and the Return of Low-Rise Jeans" in Avidly: A Channel of the L.A. Review of Books
Book Chapters
"Ascendance to Trans-Corporeality or Assimilation to Whiteness: The Posthuman Imaginaries of Annihilation and Midsommar" in Feminist Posthumanism in Contemporary Science Fiction Film and Media, Bloomsbury
Courses Taught
University of Michigan:
- Critical Perspectives on Reality TV
- Intro to Communication: Media Past and Present
- Television and Social Change
- Qualitative Industry Methods
- The Rise and Demise of Mass Culture
Villanova University:
