Associate Professor, Communication and Media
I am a critical media studies scholar who analyzes the influences, overlaps and connections between media texts, media industries, communication policies, technologies, audiences and culture. I also analyze “fake news” and other forms of digital (mis)information.
Zimdars, Melissa and Kembrew McLeod, Fake News: Understanding Media and Misinformation in the Digital Age, MIT Press, Forthcoming February 2020.
Zimdars, Melissa, Watching Our Weights: The Consequences and Contradictions of Televising Fatness in the “Obesity Epidemic, Rutgers University Press, February 2019.
Zimdars, Melissa, “American Housewife and Super Fun Night: Fat Ambiguity and Televised Bodily Comedy,” Fat Studies, July, 19, 2019 (online first).
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, 2018.
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.
Raquel Perez ’20, M’23 overcame a lifelong speech impediment and a catastrophic gas explosion to earn both a bachelor's and master’s degree from Merrimack College.
