Kathy Newman
Associate Professor | Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, UNITED STATES
Kathy Newman is a popular and mass culture expert primarily interested in the relationship between media and political formations.
Biography
Kathy Newman is a popular and mass culture expert primarily interested in the relationship between television, film, radio and print media and social and political formations. A regular blogger for Working Class Perspectives, she is also interested in issues such as labor, capitalism and the working class. She has published articles on Civil War medical photographs, the image of the graduate student in popular culture, Black radio stations in the South in the 1950s, and the challenges of being a junior professor ("Nice Work if We Can Keep It"). She is finalizing a book that combines cultural analysis with labor history, How the Fifties Worked: Mass Culture and the Decade the Unions Made. Newman regularly teaches a class at Carnegie Mellon called “Censored Texts” and can speak to the recurring history of censorship and banning books in this country.
Areas of Expertise (7)
Consumer Behavior
Literary and Cultural Studies
Film and Visual Media
Humanities Analytics
History of Technology
Politics and Public Policy
Energy Policy
Media Appearances (7)
Sorry, ‘Real Housewives.’ Gen Z is all about Mormon wives
CNN online
2024-12-11
When it was released earlier this year, Hulu's "The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives" gained extreme popularity among Gen Z and young millennial viewers. As a second season is underway, Kathy Newman, discusses why the show might have gained such strong traction: "It's more of a prurient fascination with some sort of culture that's perceived as different."
Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione: 2 men greeted with public adoration, zeal for vigilantism
Gothamist online
2024-12-10
Kathy M. Newman, an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University who studies social formations and workers rights, said she was struck by the public response in the immediate aftermath of Thompson’s shooting death outside a Midtown hotel, particularly the “thousands and thousands of laughing emojis in response to the news of this death.” “There was an outpouring of malice towards Thompson, the victim, and an outpouring of romance and support and almost love for the person who killed him,” Newman said. “That really took me by surprise.”
How K-12 Book Bans Affect Higher Education
Inside Higher Ed online
2022-02-10
“If you want to get kids excited about reading, you let them read whatever they’re interested in, and kids are interested in the things that are in banned books,” said Kathy M. Newman, an English professor who heads the Banned Books Project at Carnegie Mellon University. “They’re interested in sex, they’re interested in sexuality, they’re interested in race and racial controversy.”
Podcasts Across CMU
Carnegie Mellon University online
2021-06-29
Kathy M. Newman, an associate professor of English, decided to try an alternative approach to the traditional term paper in her class "Topics in Literature: Watching HBO's Watchmen" in the spring semester of 2021. For their final project, Newman's students produced an eleven episode podcast series, "Tartans Watch the Watchmen."
CMU Students Launch Book Drive for Allegheny County Jail Inmates
Carnegie Mellon University online
2020-12-11
Students under the guidance of Kathy Newman, an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, organized a book drive for the inmates of the Allegheny County Jail (ACJ).
Art Exhibit Marx@200 Explores The Socialist Thinker's Legacy
90.5 WESA online
2018-04-05
Among those who find Marx’s insights in works like Das Kapital relevant today are the curators of Marx@200, an art exhibit that opens this Friday at SPACE gallery, Downtown. Kathy Newman, an English professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and CMU art professor Susanne Slavick organized the big group show, which features work by 40 artists and artist groups from around the U.S. and the world.
Nuclear radiation in pop culture: more giant lizards than real science
The Christian Science Monitor online
2011-03-30
Pop culture treatment of nuclear fallout fears have gone through several stages since World War II, says Kathy Newman, associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In the 1950s and early ‘60s, she points out, the depictions were largely fantastical, horror- and B-movie subjects, with whole cities being destroyed and populations dying terrible deaths.
Media
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Industry Expertise (4)
Media - Print
Media - Broadcast
Media - Online
Public Policy
Education (1)
University of California at Berkeley: Ph.D.
Links (4)
Articles (3)
Boycotts Past and Present: From the American Revolution to the Campaign to Boycott Israel ed. by David Feldman
Antisemitism Studies2020 430 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (October 2020) antisemitism research, such as the utilization of anti-Jewish rhetoric by political officials in the European Union. While one would have wished for more editorial guidance and closer attention to ideological transformations, the volume gives the reader a good sense of the state—and the lacunas—of contemporary research on new antisemitism.
Union Is Not a Four-Letter Word: Television and Labor in the Age of Streaming
Labor2023 This article considers the problem of social class in contemporary television, focusing on the last five years. The author considers the ways in which streaming platforms are increasing the range and diversity of stories that television can offer; in addition, she shifts the conversation from class, consumption, and representation to work, labor, and production, arguing that this view highlights the extent to which television is engaging with questions of labor more often than we realize.
Game Change Get access Arrow
The Journal of American History2012 In 1915 D. W. Griffith imagined a world where the moving picture would replace the history book: “The time will come when children … will be taught practically everything by moving pictures,” he imagined. “Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again” (“Five Dollar ‘Movies’ Prophesied,” Editor, April 24, 1915, pp. 407–10).
