Michael ReinhardVisiting Assistant Professor
Michael Reinhard's research and teaching interests focus on the history and politics of feminist, queer, & trans media studies, digital & social media, documentary, media consumption, visual culture, and television. Before his time at Emory, he was a National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow with the “Rediscovering American Democracy” project at Montclair State. Elsewhere, Dr. Reinhard has taught courses at Columbia University and Rutgers University within the areas of Film Studies, Media Studies, and American Studies.
Across these research areas, Dr. Reinhard’s work is interested in how civil rights politics were commercialized by braiding the language of social, political, and media representation. To chart this braiding, he is preparing his first book, The Diva’s Public: Celebrity, Media Activism, and the New Cultural Citizenship. This project studies new media approaches to performance by global pop stars as public female figures, and it has attracted strong interest from the University of California Press. In this work, Dr. Reinhard examines how ideas about social progress were transformed by civil rights movements through media industry. By studying how diva performers began forging branded associations with the NAACP, queer liberation, and second wave feminist activism, this project foregrounds how systems of advertising and media production participated in reshaping public understandings of media consumption as a tool for social justice. Crucially, Dr. Reinhard sees this new understanding of media consumption as a vital lens for understanding contemporary debates about history, culture, and society in the 21st-century.
Dr. Reinhard’s work has appeared in Velvet Light Trap, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and Transformative Works and Cultures. His essays have also appeared in edited collections like Music and Myth in Las Vegas (U Illinois UP), The Films of Susan Seidelman (Edinburgh UP), and Intersectional Feminist Readings of Comics (Routledge). Future work is slated to appear in GLQ,Feminist Media Histories, Sexualities, and The Oxford Handbook of American Documentary.
Associations:
Education:
- PhD, University of California, Los Angeles
- MA, University of Chicago
- BA, University of Chicago
