Victoria E. Johnson is a Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include broadcast media theory, social and critical history of U.S. television and popular film, sports media and media policy, and rural access to communication technology. Her book, Sports TV, brings these interests together to offer a critical and historical examination of sports TV in the United States, focusing on business practices, formal properties, and the medium’s social, cultural, and political meanings.
Her book Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity, examines the imagination of the American Midwest as symbolic “heartland” in critical moments in prime-time television and U.S. social history. It was awarded the Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Prize by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Johnson is currently working on book projects and articles that examine sports’ built-environment, a key television-era drivers of campaigns for civic “renewal” and redevelopment via “experience economy” tourism, particularly in the Rust Belt.
