Meenakshi Gigi Durham

Associate Professor

Department: Journalism & Mass Communication
Email: gigi-durham@uiowa.edu
Office: E338 AJB
Phone: (319) 335-3355

Meenakshi Gigi Durham's work centers on media and the politics of the body, with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, race, and youth cultures. She holds a joint appointment in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Her work has appeared in leading academic journals, including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Theory, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, and Women's Studies in Communication. She is the author of The Lolita Effect (Overlook, 2008) and the co-editor, with Douglas M. Kellner, of Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks (Blackwell, 2001, rev. 2006).

She serves on the editorial boards of a number of scholarly journals, including Feminist Media Studies and the Journal of Communication. She also served on the advisory board for the Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents and the Media. Her essay, "Grieving," published in the Harvard Review in 2010, has been selected for inclusion in the 2011 Best American Essays anthology. She is the recipient of a Faculty Scholar Award from The University of Iowa.

Before coming to Iowa in the Fall of 2000, she taught  at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was the recipient of an honorable mention for the campus-wide Gilbert Teaching Excellence Award in Women's and Gender Studies.