Andrea Press
press@uiuc.edu
Research Professor of Communications
Professor of Speech Communication
Professor of Gender and Women's Studies
Primary areas of interest: Feminist cultural studies; critical theory; sociology of media audiences; sociology of technology and its use; feminist theory and methodology; qualitative and ethnographic methodologies; film and film theory.
Professor Press is interested in the intersection of feminist and other critical theoretical traditions, particularly as each bears on the investigation of media influence in contemporary cultural life. She teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses that draw on these traditions and investigate questions about the interweaving of the mass media with modern cultural traditions. In particular, she is interested in the philosophical foundations of contemporary cultural studies, the intellectual and epistemological foundations of qualitative methodologies in the social sciences, and the emerging tradition of feminist cultural studies.
Her own work has focused on the qualitative study of female television audiences. Her first book, Women Watching Television (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) was based on interviews with working-class and middle-class women of different generations about entertainment television they had watched. Her recent book, Speaking of Abortion: Television and Authority in the Lives of Women (University of Chicago Press), co-authored with psychologist Elizabeth Cole, is based on focus-group interviews with pro-life and pro-choice women of different social classes about abortion and television. She has also written on issues related to the research process itself, in particular about trends in current feminist theory, the issue of "feminist" research methodology, and more generally about traditions in the sociological study of audiences. Her forthcoming book is an ethnographic study of the role of the internet in the lives of children, teenagers, and their families.
Ph.D., Sociology, University of California-Berkeley
