On April 14, UMASS Communication hosted Professor Katherine Sender of Cornell University as the 2023 Annual Speaker and part of the Department of Communication 50th Anniversary celebrations. Sender delivered her lecture “Whence The Straight And Narrow: Thirty Years Of Queer Media Studies” detailing her experiences in the field over the course of her career and laying out challenges for the future.
Sender is one of the world’s leading scholars in the area of LGBTQ representations, and is the author of numerous scholarly articles and two books: The Making of the Gay Market: Business, Not Politics and The Makeover: Reality Television and Reflexive Audiences. She began her career at UMASS (‘96MA, ‘01PhD) and held subsequent positions at Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and the University of Auckland (New Zealand). She is currently Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Communication, Cornell University.
Using her own documentary filmmaking as a springboard, Dr. Sender used clips from her films and other examples from contemporary media to examine how to make sense of LGBTQ media and marketing within the radical shifts in production, texts, distribution, economies, and audience receptions, that digital technologies have enabled. Dr. Sender then traced the arc of gay and lesbian representation through television history and discussed how this has changed in tandem with the rise of new technological delivery systems. She concluded with personal examples of different applications for her documentary filmmaking and academic writing noting the importance of valuing academic productivity beyond written scholarship, and how this can influence both the casual viewer and activity within the academy.
After a brief question and answer period there was a reception and champagne toast to the 50 year anniversary of the Department of Communication. Sender’s name was then added to the plaque hanging in the HUB commemorating past Annual Lecture speakers.