Dr. Barbara Selznick

Dr. Barbara Selznick, Associate Professor, received her doctorate from Northwestern University's Department of Radio-Television-Film in 1997. Dr. Selznick's research examines how films and television series are shaped by the industrial, social, and cultural contexts in which they are created. Dr. Selznick's book on art film exhibition, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2001. Global Television: Co-Producing Culture was published by Temple University Press in 2008. Her latest book, TV’s American Dream: U.S. Television after the Great Recession (Bloomsbury, 2025), examines how the U.S. television industry in the 2010s pursued audiences whose ideas about hope, fairness, work, and economic class were shaped by the Great Recession. Dr. Selznick has also published research examining the importance of branding for the U.S. television industry using case studies such as the Syfy network (in Journal of Science Fiction Film and Television), ABC Family/Freeform (in the anthology From Networks to Netflix), and Doctor Who (in the anthology Peregrinations, and Regenerations: A Critical Approach to Doctor Who). Other recent work explores 1980s sitcoms (in the anthology Very Special Episodes: Televising Industrial and Social Change), the depiction of the female detective as mother on television (in MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture), and the intersection of star image and the depiction of class on Ozark (in the journal TV/Series).