Viveca Greene, associate professor of media studies, earned a Ph.D. from the communication department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as well as the university's highest teaching honor: The Distinguished Teaching Award. She holds an Ed.M. from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education and a B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Professor Greene is co-editor (with Ted Gournelos) of A Decade of Dark Humor: How Comedy, Irony, and Satire Shaped Post-9/11 America (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). Her work has appeared in Social Semiotics, In Media Res, The Nation, and We the Media: A Citizen's Guide to Fighting for Media Democracy. Slated for publication in 2019 are her articles on toxic uses of irony and social media (Studies in American Humor) and on feminist satire and rape culture (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society), and an essay on racist trolling and critical humor studies (The Joke Is on Us: Political Comedy in Late Neoliberal Times).
She teaches courses on satire, audience research, and critical media studies.
Recent and Upcoming Courses
- Special Projects
- Introduction to Media Studies: Old Media and New Media
This course will introduce students to the theory and practice of media studies, an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that analyzes the complex interactions between old and new media, culture, politics and ideology. We will use various forms of US media as lenses through which to focus our study, as well as to develop an understanding of the relationship between media institutions, texts and audiences. In this discussion-based and writing-intensive course, students will read and write analyses of both cultural theory and specific texts, and ultimately produce a final paper on a topic of their own choosing.
