Vita
Jane Feuer was a widely acclaimed film and television scholar and has been Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh since 2000. Having studied English at Indiana University and the University of Iowa, Feuer gained her doctoral degree in 1978 with a dissertation on the subject “The Hollywood Musical: The Aesthetics of Spectator Involvement in an Entertainment Form”. From 1978 to 1981, Feuer was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication at University of Evansville before moving to University of Pittsburgh, where she was appointed Full Professor in 2000, both by the Department of English as well as the Department of Communication and Rhetoric. In 2009, Feuer was awarded the Fulbright German Distinguished Chair in American Studies at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany, for a period of one year.
Feuer has been a founding board member of Console-ing Passions: Television, Audio, Video, New Media, and Feminism since 1992, a working group which organises annual conferences on media issues with a special emphasis on gender and sexuality and which consists, among others, of prospective IKKM fellow Lynn Spigel. Apart from that, Feuer served as an editorial board member of an Israeli book series entitled Assaph Kolnoa: Studies in Cinema and Television (since 1999) as well as the Journal of E-Media Studies and the Critical Studies in Television (both since 2006).
Fields of research
Modern critical practice; film melodrama; theories of popular culture; genre and film and reception theories.
Publications
Monographs
Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism. Durham: Duke University Press 1995.
The Hollywood Musical. London: The Macmillan Press 1982.
Edited Books
with Paul Kerr, Tise Vahimagi: MTM: Quality Television. London: British Film Institute Publishing 1984.
Articles
“Psychoanalytischer Raum in HBO-Dramen The Sopranos und In Treatment/ Psychoanalytic Space in HBO Dramas: The Sopranos and In Treatment”. In: Christoph Dreher (ed.): Autorenserien II. Quality TV in den USA und Europa/ Auteur Series II. Quality TV in the USA and Europe. München: Fink 2014, pp. 257-287.
“The International Art Musical: Defining and Periodising the Post-1980s Musical”. In: Steven Cohan: The Sound of Musicals. London: Palgrave Macmillan 2010, pp. 54-63.
“Town Meetings of the Imagination: Northern Exposure and The Gilmore Girls”. In: David Scott Diffrient, David Lavery (eds.): Screwball Television: Critical Perspectives on Gilmore Girls. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 2010, pp. 148-164.
“Averting the Male Gaze: Visual Pleasure and Images of Fat Women”. In: M.B. Haralovich, Lauren Rabinovitz (eds.): Television, History and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays. Durham: Duke University Press 1999, pp. 181-200.
“HBO and the Concept of Quality TV”. In: Kim Akass, Janet McCabe (eds.): Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. London: I.B. Tauris 2007, pp. 145-157.
“Narrative Form in American Network Television”. In: Colin MacCabe: High theory, Low Culture: Analysing Popular Television and Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press 1986, pp. 101-114.
“The Concept of Live TV: Ontology as Ideology”. In: E. Ann Kaplan (ed.): Regarding Television: Critical Approaches, An Anthology. Los Angeles: American Film Institute, University Publications of America 1983, pp. 12-21.