“My friends joked that the only job I’d be qualified for was to host ‘I love the 2000s’ on VH1. Ironically, I am now both a writer and a pop culture critic,” said Andrea McDonnell, Assistant Professor of Communications and Media Studies at Emmanuel College. Her field of focus is media, specifically media produced and consumed by women.
McDonnell now finds herself teaching three classes in the Fall 2016 semester with about 55 students total. These numbers vary, in the Spring 2016 semester McDonnell has 80-85 students. She is also the club advisor for Emmanuel College Communications Club and distinction advisor to seniors for their final semester.
Helping Students Realize Their Potential
In the fall of 2016, McDonnell was the distinction advisor for three Communications and Media Studies students. According to the Emmanuel College website, a distinction in the field is given to a student who have a grade point average of 3.5 or higher in their major courses and who complete a presentation of their project. This project is a significant research project the student completes with the help of a professor who is their distinction advisor. After being reviewed by the student’s major department, they are either granted or denied distinction in the field.
Class of 2016’s Eve Barkin was one of McDonnell’s distinction students. Barkin’s presentation was titled A cross-generational reading of HBO’s Sex and the City. Her distinction focused on “how women cross-generationally interact with these texts, and what these interactions reveal about millennial-targeted media in the 21st century,” as described in a Distinction in the Field flyer.
McDonnell was also the distinction advisor for Rachel Aiello and Jennifer Burgess, also of the Class of 2016. Aiello’s distinction was titled Making it Ours: Our Bodies, ourselves and the dynamics of literary liberation and “explores Our Bodies, Our Selves and its origins at a 1969 Women’s Liberation Conference at Emmanuel College to highlight the influence of a media text and how it can function to make the personal political,” according to a Distinction in the Field flyer. Burgess’ distinction, Kardashian Kulture: Exploring the beauty myth within 21st-century media, focused on “the Kardashian-Jenner family, analyzing the ways in which these self-created stars have utilized their “beauty-empire”, television series, and social media personalities to shape and mold the lens through which beauty is understood within American and global, culture today,” as listed on a Distinction in the Field flyer.
“It was a no brainer,” Barkin said about selecting McDonnell as her distinction advisor. “She was the one who taught me in my favorite media studies courses, and she really knew me as a student.” Barkin credits McDonnell with driving her towards interesting projects and her best possible work.
“It was incredibly helpful that she knew my learning style and what I was most interested in when it came to media studies,” said Barkin. “She was able to help me pick my topic and sculpt my thesis and distinction project using that personal knowledge.”
“I love to see how the projects unfold and to be a source of support and encouragement,” said McDonnell. She does not like to make the project all about her suggestions, however, and wants the focus to be on what the student is creating.
“My role is really just to help the students know that they have the skills and the thoughtfulness to achieve their goals and the rest takes care of itself,” McDonnell said. Her process seems to have worked because all three of her distinction advisees received distinction in the field.
Before Media Studies and Emmanuel
McDonnell is originally from Hicksville, Long Island, which McDonnell credits as being “very suburban” rather than “hick-like.”
“People sometimes think I am trying to be funny but that’s the actual town.” In high school, McDonnell wanted to be a poet. She always enjoyed creative writing and her parents never dissuaded her from pursuing that dream.
“I couldn’t choose. I became an American Culture major because it was interdisciplinary and very flexible,” McDonnell said. In college, she took classes in all areas of study, from English to Print Making. She interned at Jane magazine, which launched in September 1997 and ran until August 2007. This publication designed for women who did not like the typical format of women’s magazines and targeted those in the age range of 18-34. McDonnell was well within that age group when she wrote for the magazine and so not only was she primed to be a consumer, but seeing the inner workings of the magazine opened her eyes to the construction of media designed for women.
After graduating in 2001 from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie with a B.A. in American Culture, New York, McDonnell moved back home to Long Island and worked roughly eight jobs in New York City and upstate New York over the course of two years.
“I was a security guard at a couple of big name museums,” said McDonnell. “Imagine! I am the least threatening security guard out there.” After writing for a sculpture website, McDonnell got a job as an educator at the Long Island Children’s Museum. “That was also where I started reading gossip magazines and where my idea for my dissertation took hold,” said McDonnell.
McDonnell went back to school, this time to the University of Michigan for her P.h.D. in Communication Studies. McDonnell’s dissertation, Just Like Us: Celebrity Gossip Magazines in American Popular Culture, looks at the production, content, and readership of gossip magazines to understand why they matter in contemporary American culture. In 140 pages, her dissertation looks at “tabloidization and the gendered public,” the female reader in relation to celebrity gossip magazines, and the “ordinary celebrity.” McDonnell’s dissertation closely resembles her first book, Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines, which was published in 2014.
Implementing Her Field at Emmanuel
McDonnell helped Barkin and Piccirillo to found the Emmanuel College Communications Club in 2014. The mission of the club is to “create an open forum for discussion of media and culture, fostered by an innovative, creative, and honest exchange of ideas and opinions,” according to their Facebook page. Under McDonnell’s guidance, the club has gone on to host events such as “Was it Something I Tweeted?” and a 1 in 5 Sexual Assault discussion.
“When me and Eve had the idea to start the communications club, Andrea was a huge help in turning the idea of a communications club into an actual organization,” said Piccirillo. “So she also was my club advisor. But quickly she turned into someone I look up to as a mentor and friend.”
Both Piccirillo and Barkin feel this way about McDonnell, that she has become more than a professor to them. Though neither had her as an official advisor, both agree they used her as an additional resource, seeking guidance and advice from her regularly.
“Andrea also cares about her students and the EC community, I think all the work she has done as an advocate to spread awareness about campus sexual assault is a testament to that,” said Piccirillo.
McDonnell has brought these ideas forward in her students, especially in Barkin and Piccirillo. After being her students for four years, they have come to know her on a more personal level. They see her as an incredibly intelligent, kind, and passionate person. “She’s very humble and dedicated to helping her students find their way,” said Barkin.
“She really loves Survivor,” said Rachel Piccirillo, one of Andrea McDonnell’s former students. “Unsure what that says exactly about her but she’s the only person I know on earth that still watches.”
Where is She Now?
McDonnell is currently in the process of writing a second book entitled Media & Celebrity. She is co-writing this book with Susan Douglas, a professor at the University of Michigan and McDonnell’s mentor and friend. Douglas has previously written literature on celebrity and reality as well as celebrity and aging. Both of their fields of concentration focus on women and their representation in media.
Through her research, McDonnell hopes to show that aspects of our cultural landscape that are often deemed as trashy matter in terms of how we see society and ourselves.
“I wanted to redeem women’s popular culture, so often seen as trash, as a worthy object of academic study and as an important touchstone for our broader national identity,” said McDonnell.
“When I was conducting research for my first book, I realized how scattered the literature on celebrity and media was,” said McDonnell. “There were lots of studies of celebrity and film and celebrity culture, history, etc. But the studies about media and celebrity were kind of all over the place and there was not a single, clear history of the intersection between media technologies and the rise of celebrity culture. By the time I finished that book, I thought, ‘I could write this history.’”
Abbi Matheson 