Department of Communication and Theatre Arts

Gary Edgerton, Chair & Professor

Understanding Mass Communication, Film as Communication, Television and Society, Media Literacy, The Documentary Tradition, International Film History, American Film History, Television, History and Memory, and Mass Media and Popular Culture

Ph.D. & M.A. University of Massachusetts

Gary Edgerton is professor and chair of the Communication and Theatre Arts Department at Old Dominion University. He has published eight books and more than seventy essays on a wide assortment of media and culture topics in a variety of books, scholarly journals, and encyclopedias. His most recent monograph is The Columbia History of American Television (Columbia University Press, 2007). He also received Honorable Mention (Second Place) in the 2001 John G. Cawelti Book Award of the American Culture Association for Outstanding Scholarly Inquiry into American Cultural Studies for Ken Burns’s America (Palgrave for St. Martin’s Press); and First Place in the 2001 Ray B. Browne National Book Award of the Popular Culture Association in the Textbook Category for Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age (University Press of Kentucky).

In addition, Dr. Edgerton is the Co-Executive Editor of the Journal of Popular Film and Television, General Editor for the “Essential Reader Series in Contemporary Media and Culture” from the University Press of Kentucky, and an editorial board member of five other scholarly journals and two book series. He has also delivered more than ninety scholarly presentations at various international, national, and regional conferences, including invited talks at King Alfred’s College in Winchester, England, Oxford University in England, Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, University of Aalborg in Denmark, and Universidad de Las Americas in Puebla, Mexico, among others. In 2004 he received the American Culture Association Governing Board Award for Outstanding Contributions to American Cultural Studies.

Moreover, Professor Edgerton has taught courses in Media History, Theory, and Criticism; Contemporary Media and Culture; News and the Documentary Tradition; and Media Production. Over the years he has been recognized with three teaching awards. He also averages two-dozen commentaries per year since 1990 across a wide variety of media and culture topics in magazines such as Newsweek, Salon, U.S. News & World Report, and Variety; national newspapers such as the Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, U.S.A. Today, and Washington Post; regional newspapers such as the Baltimore Sun, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, and Los Angeles Times; and numerous interviews on national and local TV and radio programs, including CNN, C-SPAN, Fox News, and Morning Edition (NPR), among many others media outlets.