Miranda Banks

Dr. Banks’ primary area of research is the American film and television industries. Her work focuses on creative and craft guilds and unions, with a specific focus on power dynamics and creative production. She is author of The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and their Guild (Rutgers University Press, 2015), co-editor of Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (Routledge, 2009) and co-editor of Production Studies, The Sequel! Cultural Studies of Global Media Industries (Routledge, 2015).

Dr. Banks is a Principal Investigator at the Emerson Engagement Lab. Her work at the Lab has focused on engagement games around collaborative labor and tensions between individual gain and team building. Her current game is Room at the Top, a game that challenges ideas about bias in media production. Previously, she worked on The Boda-Boda Game, a partnership with the Red Cross in Uganda.

She has written for Television & New Media, Cinema Journal, Popular Communication, Cultural Studies, Flow, and The Journal of Popular Film and Television, as well as for the anthologies Gender and Creative Labour, How to Watch Television (NYU Press, 2013), The Handbook of Television Studies (Sage, 2014), Teen Television (BFI, 2004), and Garb: A Reader on Fashion and Culture (Prentice Hall, 2007).

As part of her research and teaching, she has received fellowships from the Academy of Television Arts and Science and the National Association of Television Program Executives, as well as an invitation to attend the Television Critics Association 2008 summer press tour. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Motion Picture Oral History Digital Archive and the Board of the Console-ing Passions Conference. She will be serving on the Society of Cinema and Media Studies Board of Directors from 2017-2019.

Dr. Banks teaches classes on film and television history, media industries, production studies within the department. She also teaches courses through the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies for both the minor in Digital Culture and the minor in Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and graduate M.A. courses through the Civic Media Art and Practice program.