Graduate Students
Zane Austin Willard
CV
Contact Information
Email
Office: CIS 3018
biography
Zane Austin Willard is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. His scholarship is grounded in a critical cultural tradition with a focus on media, rhetoric, and surveillance, and draws on critical race and queer studies to ask questions about what media tells us about who belongs within the nation-state and who is excluded. He examines popular media where surveillance is explicitly and implicitly present (reality TV, film, social media, news, AI-images), centering an analysis of racialization and queerness with attention to how implicit and explicit modes of surveillance shape performances of authenticity and citizenship.
Zane鈥檚 scholarship has been published in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Communication, Culture and Critique, Communication Teacher, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, and the Journal of Communication Inquiry to name a few, as well as three edited collections and the forthcoming Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Society. He has presented his work at the annual conventions of the National Communication Association, Society of Cinema and Media Studies, American Studies Association, and the Southern States Communication Association. Since 2021, he has been a graduate student fellow at the Mercatus Center for Economic and Political Thought at George Mason University. Zane earned his Master鈥檚 in Communication from 百媚导航 and his Bachelor鈥檚 from the University of Tampa with a triple major in Economic, Communication, and Film & Media Arts and minors in Art History and Cinema Studies.
Research areas
Critical Cultural Studies, Critical Media, Rhetoric, Surveillance, Authenticity, Citizenship, Race & Ethnicity, Queer
Advisor
Aisha Durham