Marsha F Cassidy
Email Address: mcassidy@uic.eduCollege: Liberal Arts and Sciences Department: English
Title: Senior Lecturer
Office: 2008 UH M/C 162 Phone: 312-413-8939
Webpage: http://tigger.uic.edu/~mcassidy/
Participating in the Chancellor’s Undergraduate Research Awards program: Yes
Research Interest:
As a scholar and historian in media studies, I am interested in the ways in which media texts simulate sensations and corporeal experiences on the screen and appeal to both the body and mind of the viewer. My work is inter-disciplinary: I am researching how phenomenology, cultural studies, and new work in neuroscience and psychology help explain the ways in which media texts are designed to provoke visceral, multi-sensory, and emotional responses. My research in this area began with a study of cigarette advertising on television from 1948 to 1971 (before the government ban). I concluded that cigarette ads not only appealed to viewers' cultural and social desires but also evoked much more powerful sensory responses, arousing through sight and sound the sensations of touch, taste, and inhalation. One of my most recent published essays examines the gender meanings embedded in the visceral acts of eating, dieting, and vomiting in the TV series MAD MEN and SIX FEET UNDER. I have also presented a paper on the Sundance series PUSH GIRLS, which follows four paralyzed women who experience life from the corporeal and cultural vantage point of a wheelchair. I suggest that PUSH GIRLS offers viewers a visceral and kinetic encounter with paralysis and a “stare and tell” aesthetic associated with disability performance art. At an international conference for the Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image in 2016, I presented a paper on levels of consciousness and the sublime as represented in the series SIX FEET UNDER. And I am currently under contract with Routledge Publishing to write a book with the working title, TELEVISION, BIOCULTURE, AND THE BODY. Minimum time commitment in hours per week: 4 Qualifications of a Student:
Interest in media studies, film, popular culture, philosophy, neuroscience, psychology; familiarity with library research; reliability; ability to meet deadlines; punctual; clear writer. Brief Summary of what is expected from the student:
Research the ways in which the mind sciences and recent work in cognitive film studies can help explain viewers' somatic and visceral responses to television texts. Screen selected TV texts that illustrate television's corporeal appeals. Take notes that document key examples. Locate and summarize scholarly research on the selected TV programs. The research assistant and I will meet regularly to discuss findings.
NOTE: This researcher is currently not accepting applications for the Undergraduate Research Experience program.
