Biography

Andrea Press is Chair of the Media Studies Department and the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Media Studies and Sociology at the University of Virginia, where she also served as Executive Director of the Virginia Film Festival and serves as a College Fellow. She came to the University of Virginia in 2006 to shepherd the Media Studies Program to departmental status and to begin its graduate program. Her last appointment was at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, where she directed the Media Studies Program for nine years, was one of the producers of the Roger Ebert Festival of Overlooked Films, received the Arnold O. Beckman award for excellence in research, and was the recipient of a faculty fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the year before she left. Her M.A. and Ph.D. are in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and her B.A. is in Sociology and Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College. She has a wide range of interdisciplinary interests spanning the social sciences and the humanities which comprise Media Studies. Prior to coming to the University of Virginia, Professor Press held faculty positions at the University of California at Davis, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, the London School of Economics, and Hebrew University in departments as diverse as communications, sociology, writing studies, social psychology, film, and women’s studies. She held an NIMH Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Medical College of the University of Kentucky, was scholar-in-residence at the Stanhope Center for Communications Policy Research, and has served as Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and at Hebrew University.  Press is the recipient of several grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Danforth Foundation, and Soroptimist International.

Professor Press is internationally known for her interdisciplinary scholarship on the media audience, on feminist media issues, and on media and social class in the U.S. She has authored or edited the forthcoming US Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism, The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminism, Feminist Reception Studies in a Post-Audience Age, The New Feminist Television Studies, Media and Class, The New Media Environment, Speaking of Abortion: Television and Authority in the Lives of Women, and Women Watching Television: Gender, Class And Generation In The American Television Experience.  For the past fifteen years she has co-edited the journal The Communication Review, and has also edited book series in feminist media studies for the University of Pennsylvania Press and the University of Illinois Press. Professor Press’ work has been translated into Egyptian Arabic and Chinese.  Professor Press is known for pioneering the use of qualitative research methods to study the cultural impact of the media in the U.S., and for innovative work on media “impact” vis-a-vis members of different genders and social classes. Professor Press has published numerous essays, articles, and chapters on feminist media theory, social class and the media, and media audiences. Her forthcoming book US Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism offers an analysis of the way feminist representations in the media impacts men and women of different ages and social class backgrounds. Press currently serves as Vice-Chair/Chair of the Feminist Scholarship Division of the International Communication Association.

Andrea Press is a member of the Graduate Faculty.