Dr. Rosalind A. Sibielski

Education

B.A., Rhode Island College

M.A., Rhode Island College

Ph.D., Bowling Green State University 
 

Selected Publications

"'What else about our reality is actually a disorder?': Mental Illness as Crisis of Reality and Morality in FX's Legion." forthcoming, Television and New Media.

"Reviving Cinderella: Contested Feminism and Conflicting Models of Female Empowerment in 21st-Century Film and Television Adaptations of "Cinderella", Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol. 36, Issue 7 (2019): 584-610.

"Gendering the Monster Within:  Biological Essentialism, Sexual Difference, and the Changing Symbolic Functions of the Monster in Popular Werewolf Texts" in Monstrous Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader, editors Marina Levina and Diem-My Bui (Bloomsbury Publishing, June 2013). 

"Beyond Democratization and Subversion: Rethinking Feminist Analytical Approaches to Girls' Cultural Production on the Internet" in Cyberfeminism 2.0, editors Radhika Gajjala and Yeun Ju Oh (Peter Lang Publishing Group, March 1, 2012).

"Becoming Victim, Becoming Empowered, Becoming Girl: Discourses of Girlhood in the U.S. at the Turn of the Millennium," in "Becoming Girl," ed. Leandra Preston, special issue, Rhizomes 22 (Summer 2011): available online at http://www.rhizomes.net/issue22/index.html.

"'Nothing Hurts the Cause More Than That': Veronica Mars and the Business of the Backlash," Feminist Media Studies 10, no. 3 (2010): 321-334.

"Postmodern Narrative or Narrative of the Postmodern?: History, Identity and the Failure of Rationality as an Ordering Principle in Memento," Literature and Psychology 49, no. 4 (2004): 82-100.

Courses

ENGL 120 Studies in Literature and Identity (Topic = Reading the Body)
ENGL 550 Comparative Storytelling: Literature, Film, TV, and Digital Media
FILM 116 Introduction to Film
FILM 221 Film History II
FILM 262 Film and Representation: Cross-Cultural Projections (Topic = Cinema of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict)
FILM 350 Media and Convergence Culture
FILM 352 Queer Cinema
FILM 352 Monster Movies
FILM 353 Middle Eastern Cinema
FILM 354 Quality TV
FILM 354 Film v. TV
FILM 355 Movies and Participatory Culture
FYS 100 Superhero Stories
FYS 100 Fairy Tales Reimagined

Research Interests

Since the work that I do is in the area of cultural studies, it encompasses aspects of contemporary popular culture that, like the courses that I teach, span both literature and media. My primary research interest is in the cultural dimensions of shared stories—both the function of such stories and the ways in which they variously reflect, impact, and even sometimes challenge, the things that we as a culture believe about ourselves, the world around us, and our places in that world. All of the courses that I teach examine these aspects of storytelling, as well as the ways in which audiences engage with, interpret, and otherwise interact with stories—whether told primarily through words or images—in order to make meaning from them.

Some of the courses that I teach focus on developments in contemporary media production, including stories that unfold (and are told) across some combination of literature, comics, movies, TV or streaming series, digital media, and video games. Others focus on the ways in which audiences engage with stories beyond just reading or watching them (including shadow casting, staged readings, live action role playing, cosplay, and various kinds of video recreations), as well as the ways in which audiences participate in storytelling that extends novels, movies, or TV shows beyond their original versions (including fan-created prequels, sequels, spin-offs, mashups, and remixes in the forms of fan videos or fan fiction). Finally, because one of the cultural dimensions of storytelling that I am most interested in involves the ways in which popular stories both shape and are shaped by the different ways that our culture thinks about both personal identity and social identity, a large number of the courses that I teach also focus on examining the relationships between popular culture representations of bodies, gender, sexuality, mental health, ability/disability, aging, and race/ethnicity and all the ways in which our culture thinks about and understands these identity categories.