Faculty

• Critical Health Studies
• Fake News
• Media Industries
• Media Studies
• Television Studies

I am a critical media studies scholar who analyzes the influences, overlaps and connections between television programs, media industries, communication policies, technologies, audiences and culture. I also analyze “fake news” and other forms of digital mis/disinformation.

• Critical Health Studies
• Global Media
• Journalism
• Media Industries
• New Media

• (COM 2401) Introduction to Mass Communication
• (COM 3312W) Television Criticism
• (COM 3322) Radio Production
• (COM 3350) Media Industries and Organizations
• (COM 4326) New Media and Digital Communication
• (COM 4450) Global Media

Zimdars, Melissa, “Watching Our Weights: The Consequences and Contradictions of Televising Fatness in the “Obesity Epidemic,” Rutgers University Press, Forthcoming.

Zimdars, Melissa, “TLC: Food, Fatness and Spectacular Relatability,” in The New Television Industries: A Guide to Changing Channels, edited by Derek Johnson. New York: Routledge, Forthcoming.

Zimdars, Melissa, “Having It Both Ways: ‘Two and a Half Men,’ ‘Entourage’ and the Televising of Juvenile Postfeminist Masculinity,” Feminist Media Studies, April 4, 2017 (online first).

Zimdars, Melissa, “Inactive Duty: Weight-Loss Television, Military Fatness and Disciplinary Discrepancy,” Television and New Media 18, no. 3 (2017): 218-234.

Zimdars, Melissa, “Fat Acceptance TV? Rethinking Reality Television with TLC’s ‘Big Sexy’ and the ‘Carnivalesque,’” Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture 13, no. 3 (2015): 232-246.

• Fellowship, Marion Jasper Whiting Foundation, 2017.
• Ramona Tomlin Mattson Fellowship, University of Iowa, 2015.
• Ballard and Seashore Fellowship, University of Iowa, 2014.