Amanda Jane Graham is a Doctoral Candidate in the Visual and Cultural Studies program at the University of Rochester. She has an M.A. in Communication and Culture from York University and a M.S. in Education from Brooklyn College. A former New York City public school teacher and community organizer, Amanda is interested in the social life of art post 1960. Her dissertation examines site-specific dances representative of Manhattan’s shifting economic, political, and architectural landscape of the 1970s. Amanda edited the IVC issue on Mad Men because she loves the show, and because she knows, as Don Draper does, that fiction is as meaningful as fact.
Erin Leary is currently completing her PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where her dissertation focuses on women’s participation in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century’s nativist and eugenics movements in America prior to the vote. Previously, she completed an MA in the History of Decorative Arts and Design. She also serves as adjunct faculty in Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, The New School for Design, and in American Fine and Decorative Art at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, where she teaches courses on decorative arts and design, gender and immigration studies, and visual culture.
Fiona Cox is a Postgraduate Research Fellow in the Film and Television Studies Department at the University of Warwick, UK. She is particularly interested in work on representations of women and sexual identities from queer and feminist perspectives. Her PhD thesis looks at the costuming and styling of lesbian characters and celebrities in contemporary visual cultures and includes an audience research project which aims to analyze how such images might contribute to the politics of personal dress-sense for lesbians today. Fiona was initially encouraged to watch Mad Men for the beautiful clothes but was overjoyed to find so many more reasons to become engrossed.
Aviva Dove-Viebahn is an Adjunct Professor of Film Studies at the University of Northern Colorado and recently received her PhD from the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Her articles have appeared in Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, Ms. Magazine, The New Republic, and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and in the anthology Queer Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2007). Her research and scholarship interrogate the intersection of television and contemporary visual art as well considering the representation of gender in popular culture.
Monique Miggelbrink is a research assistant and PhD student in Media Studies at the University of Paderborn, Germany. Monique received her BA with a double major in Media Studies and English and American Literature and Cultural Studies, and her MA in Media Studies from the University of Paderborn. In her dissertation, “(Re-) Organizing Domestic Topography: Television as Furniture” she investigates correlations between the television set as a piece of furniture, i.e. as material artifact, and its implications for the construction of gender. Her research interests include design research, media ecology, gender and media, and television history and theory.