About
Olivia Stowell's research and writing focus on race and labor in contemporary television and popular culture, particularly investigating the construction of racial identities and narratives in reality television. Her work explores how popular media enables, forecloses, or projects different racial futures and possibilities in identity formations, intergroup relations, and narratives, drawing connections between the time we spend “escaping” reality through popular media and the power relations that organize that reality.
Her dissertation project explores discursive formations of race, racism, and racialization on twenty-first century reality television. In both her research and her pedagogy, she is committed to frameworks that center justice, equity, and accessibility.
Academic Articles
“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
"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 (instructor of record)
- Qualitative Industry Methods (GSI)
- The Rise and Demise of Mass Culture (GSI)
- Television and Social Change (GSI)
- Intro to Communication: Media Past and Present (GSI)
Villanova University:
- Letters, Texts, Twitter (teaching assistant)
