Jennifer Hessler
Bio
Dr. Jennifer Hessler teaches in Film Studies and in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media PhD program. Her research integrates media history and digital media theory, focusing on television content, programming, and distribution; the way audience data is collected and used; and how audiences interface with media technologies and platforms. Her current book project, Surveilling the Viewer: Audience Measurement Technologies from Audimeter to Big Data (under contract with MIT Press) tracks the historical evolution of audience measurement technologies and their increasing amalgamation with the cybernetics industries, including how that evolution was shaped by the viewers’ more-or-less consistent cooperation in the task of being measured.
Dr. Hessler has a PhD in Film and Media Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work has been published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Television and New Media, Participations: Journal of Audience Reception Research, the Velvet Light Trap, Media Fields journal, and Flow, as well as in numerous edited book collections. She has been on the programming committee and on the steering committee of the Television Studies Special Interest Group at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies and served as a graduate student juror for the Peabody Television Awards. She has also worked on the editorial staffs of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Media, and Culture and Media Fields journal.
Education
PhD Film and Media Studies University of California, Santa Barbara 2019
MA Film and Media Studies University of California, Santa Barbara 2014
BA Film and Media Studies and Economics University of Michigan 2012
Publications
- Book Review , Critical Studies in Media Communication (2022)
- Traversing the Urban Sitcom , Border Crossings and Mobilities on Screen (2022)
- Book Review , Journal of Communication Technology (2021)
- From Social Content Ratings to Sentiment Analysis , Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies (2021)
- Peoplemeter Technologies and the Biometric Turn in Audience Measurement , Television and New Media (2021)
- The Future of the Ratings Panel , Flow (2020)
- The Portable Peoplemeter Initiative , Laboring Bodies and the Quantified Self (2020)
- The Reflexivity of Rigged Ratings , Flow (2020)
- To Each Their Own Ad , Flow (2019)
- Quality You Can't Touch: Mubi Social, Platform Politics, and the Online Distribution of Art Cinema , The Velvet Light Trap (2018)