Professor Amanda Lotz
Inactive Fellow
- Bio/Profile
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Amanda D. Lotz is a media studies professor at Queensland University of Technology. Her research focuses on understanding the implications of internet distribution on media industries, with a particular focus on U.S. television. She has also published two books on representations of gender on television and in the media.
Her most recent book, We now disrupt this broadcast (MIT Press, 2018), looks at how and why the business of television changed between 1996 and 2016 to adjust the medium's storytelling possibilities. The companion project, Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television (Maize Books, 2017), explores the connections between internet-distributed services such as Netflix and the legacy television industry as well as the business strategies and revenue models that differ.
A revised, second edition of her CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award-winning book,The Television Will Be Revolutionized was published in late 2014. The Television Will Be Revolutionized explores television’s industrial changes from the mid 1980s through 2014 and how those changes adjust television’s role as a cultural institution. She also published Cable Guys: Television and American in 2014, which examines the negotiation of masculinities across a range of television programming in the early 2000s.
Lotz also published two co-authored books, Understanding Media Industries (Oxford University Press, 2012, second revised edition 2016) with Timothy Havens, an introduction to key areas central to the analysis of media industries, and Television Studies: A Short Introduction (Polity, 2011, second revised edition 2018), with Jonathan Gray, an overview of the intellectual development of television studies. She edited the collection Beyond Prime-Time: Television After the Network Era (Routledge, 2009), which brings together established television scholars writing new chapters in their areas of expertise that reconsider how programming forms other than prime-time series (such as sports, news, soap operas, and made-for-television movies, among others) have been affected by the wide-ranging industrial changes instituted over the past twenty years.
Lotz also continues to explore representations and discourses related to gender and feminism in the media, as she did in her first book, Redesigning Women: Television after the Network Era (University of Illinois Press, 2006), which explores the rise of female-centered dramas and cable networks targeted toward women in the late 1990s as they relate to changes in the U.S. television industry. She has published articles in: Critical Studies in Media Communication;Communication, Culture, Critique; Feminist Media Studies; Media, Culture and Society; Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture; Communication Theory; Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media; Television & New Media; Screen; Journal of Popular Film and Television; and Women and Language. Her work also appears in several edited collections.
Lotz’s honors include a Mellon post-doctoral fellowship, membership in Phi Beta Kappa, receipt of the Harold E. Fellows Scholarship from the Broadcasting Education Association in 1994, and being named among the inaugural group of Fellows at the Peabody Media Center. She was named Coltrin Professor of the Year by the International Radio and Television Society in 2004 for her case study exploring the redefinition of television. She earned a Ph.D. in Radio-Television-Film and certificate in women’s studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000, and completed a two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Television Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
