Profiles of the members of the Coordinating Committee, MeCCSA Women’s Media Studies Network.
Milly Williamson
WMSN Chair
Milly Williamson is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at BrunelUniversity. She has conducted research into television and film fancultures, horror and gender. She is the author of TheLure of the Vampire: gender, fiction and fandom from Bram Stoker toBuffy (2005), and related journalarticles and chapters in edited collections. She is currently workingon a monograph on Celebrity Culture,as well as continuing to publish in the area of television studies.She is also co-authoring work on press representations of Muslims inBritain. Milly has been a member of the Women’s Media StudiesNetwork since its launch and has hosted Network events.
Anita Biressi
WMSN Communications
Anita Biressi is Reader in Media Cultures in the School of Arts, Roehampton University, London. Her research into media spectacle, documentary and factual film and TV and tabloid culture has appeared in journals and collections including Space and Culture, Screen, the Journal for Cultural Research and most recently Celebrity Studies. She is the author of Crime, Fear and the Law in True Crime Stories (2001) and co-author of Reality TV (2005). She also co-edited the Mediactive edition entitled ‘Media War’ (2004) and The Tabloid Culture Reader (2007). Her book Class in Contemporary British Culture, written with Heather Nunn, is forthcoming from Palgrave.
Anita has been a member of the Women’s Media Studies Network since its inception. She became a member of the organising group in 2002, and she currently oversees publicity and communications for the Network. Anita is also an elected member of the MeCCSA Executive , where she currently serves on the Events and Activities sub-committee.
Heather Nunn
MeCCSA Vice-Chair
Heather Nunn is Professor of Culture and Politics and Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Cultures at the School of Arts, Roehampton University, London. Her research interests include politics and the media, documentary and reality programming, cultural politics, class and gender. She has published in journals such as Screen, New Formations, the Journal for Cultural Research and Women: A Cultural Review and is the author of Thatcher, Politics and Fantasy (2002), co-author of Reality TV: Realism and Revelation (2005) and co-editor of the The Tabloid Culture Reader (2007). She is currently writing a book with Anita Biressi called Class in Contemporary British Culture.
Heather has been a member of the Women’s Media Studies Network since its launch and she has been chair of the Network since January 2003. She is Vice-Chair of the MeCCSA Executive Committee and Co-ordinator of the Activities sub-committee.
Rosalind Brunt
Rosalind Brunt is a Visiting Research Fellow in Media Studies and AssociateLecturer at Faculty of Arts, Computing, Engineering and Sciences, Sheffield Hallam University.
She has a long involvement in the institutionalrepresentation of media studies: she was the first vice -chair ofMeCCSA and the chair of the Women’s Media Studies Network. She has also served onthe QAA Quality Assurance Benchmarking Committee for the media, communication and cultural studies.
Herresearch interests include: the development of media studies in highereducation; media representation of Muslims and news coverage of theIraq occupation; and sexuality and popular culture.
Kaitlynn Mendes
Kaitlynn Mendes is a Lecturer in Media Studies at DeMontfort University. She currently teaches courses on gender and media, new communication technology, and mass media. She is a former Chair of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, which she held for two years, and is currently the co-editor of Feminist Media Study’s Commentary and Criticism section.
Kaitlynn’s main research interests involve representations of women in the mainstream press, historic reportingof women’s health issues, and children, news and citizenship. She has published articles in Feminist Media Studies, the International Encyclopedia of Communication, Sociology Compass, and the Routledge Companion to News and Journalism Studies. This is her first year serving on the MeCCSA Women’s Media Studies Network Coordinating Committee.
Margaret Montgomerie
Margaret Montgomerie is Programme Leader in Joint MediaStudies at De Montfort University. She teaches in the areas of MediaTexts and Media Gender and Identity. Her research is mainly concernedwith shifts in the representations of marginalised identities inpopular screen fictions. Her current research is focussed on media representations of impairment anddisability, working with Santesih at the University ofMontpellier and The Outside Centre, Wolverhampton.
Margaret served as a committee memberand conference organiser for AMFIT, one of the organisationswhich formed MeCCSA and she was also a Board Member of Console-ingPassions the USA-based Feminist Screen Research Conferenceorganisation. She was a founder member of the MeCCSA Women’sMedia Studies Network and organised and hosted the inaugural meetingat the University of Derby in 2001. She is currently a coordinating committeemember of the Network.
Karen Ross
Karen Ross is MeCCSA’s Treasurer. She is a Professor of Media and Public Communication and Associate Dean (Academic) in the Department of Communication and Media, University of Liverpool . She teaches political communication and gender/media, and was Visiting Professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Massey University (2007, 2009) and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Advancement of Women in Politics at Queens University Belfast (2001-2004).
She has written extensively on the relationship between women, politics and media, gender and media, and the media and the public. She has authored/co-authored seven books and edited a further 8 collections as well as numerous journal articles and conference papers. She is the foundational editor of a new Blackwell journal, Communication, Culture and Critique which launched in March 2008 and sits on the editorial board of a further six journals.
Karen’s broad research interests include the gender/media/politics nexus, new directions in audience research; relations between the media and the public; and gender and media. She has also developed several film-based training materials focused on the equality and diversity agenda in higher education. She is currently editing a Handbook on Gender, Sexualities and Media for Blackwell. Karen’s new book, Gendered Media: Women, Men and Identity Politics has just been published by Blackwell (2009).