Mary Dalton
Professor of Communication | Wake Forest University
Winston-Salem, NC, UNITED STATES
Dalton can put new TV shows in perspective and provide insightful comments about the latest feature films.
Biography
Mary Dalton is a Professor of Communication at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Teacher TV: Sixty Years of Teachers on Television and The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies. Dalton has also tracked the history of the situation comedy in her edited volume The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed. She has written and directed nine documentaries, including Martha in Lattimore about the life of Martha Mason, who lived in an iron lung for most of her life, and most recently Living in the Overlap, a love story that advocates for marriage equality.
Areas of Expertise (9)
Film
Hollywood Movies
Screenwriting
Documentary Films
Television Situational Comedies
Film Criticism
Teachers in Movies and Television
Film Production
Women in Film
Media
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Education (3)
University of North Carolina at Greensboro: Ph.D., Cultural Studies
University of North Carolina at Greensboro: M.A., Broadcasting / Cinema
Wake Forest University: B.A., Speech, Communication, and Theatre Arts
Media Appearances (4)
Wake Forest students part of Oscar buzz
Time Warner Cable News
2015-02-21
Wake Forest professors make their predictions but don't plan to watch the show. "One of the reasons I don't watch the Oscars every year is that sometimes I'm so passionate about a particular film that I just can't stand that it might lose, and a lot of times the films that I think are the very best are not the ones that the Academy choses," said Mary Dalton, Wake Forest University...
Jim Dodson, behind the scenes with Mary Dalton, India Arie, and The Sharing Project
88.5 WFDD
2014-08-01
Film scholar Mary Dalton takes us Behind the Scenes at Out at the Movies Series, Winston-Salem and the Triad's LGBT Film Series. Their celebrating their tenth anniversary and Mary’s saved you an aisle seat...
Wake Forest professor talks about her friendship with Martha Mason
Shelby Star
2013-10-17
After graduation from Wake Forest, Mason came home to Lattimore but she stayed connected to the community, Mary M. Dalton said. Dalton, who began a friendship with Mason in 2000, was the guest speaker for the Rotary meeting...
Halloween means...movies
The Huffington Post
2014-10-28
Where I'm from, Halloween means cool nights, brilliant foliage and crisp apples, but everywhere it means scary movies. Lately, I've been thinking about my scariest viewing experiences...
Articles (3)
Revising the Hollywood curriculum
Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy
I started writing about teachers, students, and schools in movies over ten years ago and have considered scores of films dating back to the 1930s. My research includes films of diverse genres—starting with dramas and comedies, and including thrillers and musicals and hybrid forms—and makes a case for a genre of motion pictures devoted solely to educators, “good teacher movies,” while also exploring other films that depict bad teachers, gay teachers, administrators, and schools as a general setting...
Media studies and emancipatory praxis: An autoethnographic essay on critical pedagogy
Journal of Film and Video
"Pedagogy" refers to the process by which teachers and students negotiate and produce meaning. This, in turn, takes into consideration how teachers and students are positioned within discursive practices and power/knowledge relations...
The Hollywood Curriculum: who is the 'good' teacher?
Curriculum Studies
In this article 26 motion pictures (distributed widely in the USA over the past 60 years) are analysed to construct a theory of curriculum in the movies. Hollywood's ‘ideal’ teachers are defined as those who share a set of character traits found consistently in these films, traits that cut across traditional film genres and remain intact throughout the eras studied...
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