Blake Beaver
Student

Blake Karsten Beaver is a PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary Program in Literature at Duke University. His research addresses the intermedial relations between 20th- and 21st-century audiovisual media, with a particular focus on television and the medium’s positioning within our broader thinking around technology, politics, genre, gender, and sexuality. His dissertation, “The National Family at the End of Broadcasting: Television Technology and Domestic Politics in America’s New Millennium,” explores the relationship between the medium of television, understood as a complex of technologies, institutions, and industries, and the social formation of the American family through a critical approach to family dramas in the new millennium. In this work, Blake argues that recent family dramas on network TV index, via allegories of technological and political crisis, a degeneration in broadcasting’s capacity to manufacture the hegemonic image of the family as a unit of national reproduction.

Before beginning his graduate career, Blake worked as a media practitioner, planning and buying print, TV, and digital media at advertising agencies in New York and Chicago on behalf of telecom, building materials, and insurance brands.

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