She has examined how Jennifer Lawrence is trapped in a prison of her “cool girl” image and why Nicole Kidman, like other actresses, has to prove herself to audiences over and over again. Anne Helen Petersen may be a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed, but she still uses academic search engines for research. With a Ph.D. in media studies from the University of Texas at Austin, she wanted to be a professor.
That didn’t happen. In 2014, after one too many failed academic job interviews, Petersen, who had also blogged and written freelance stories for online publications, took a job at BuzzFeed, then an up-and-coming site known for its listicles. Still, a job was a job.
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She has examined how Jennifer Lawrence is trapped in a prison of her “cool girl” image and why Nicole Kidman, like other actresses, has to prove herself to audiences over and over again. Anne Helen Petersen may be a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed, but she still uses academic search engines for research. With a Ph.D. in media studies from the University of Texas at Austin, she wanted to be a professor.
That didn’t happen. In 2014, after one too many failed academic job interviews, Petersen, who had also blogged and written freelance stories for online publications, took a job at BuzzFeed, then an up-and-coming site known for its listicles. Still, a job was a job.
She now does what she spent years training to do, infusing stories about celebrities with historical context, research, and analysis (she even has a former-academic colleague, a fellow BuzzFeed writer with a Ph.D. in American studies from Brown University). Scholars may envy the scope of her audience, though it comes with a fair share of critics, she says.
Petersen has encouraged academics to work with journalists to make their research more accessible. It’s not about dumbing things down, but simply reaching a different audience, she wrote in her newsletter in February. A layperson editor can help, she said, “so that you remember not to use words like ‘hegemony.’”
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Petersen tries to entice readers from the start (no “In this paper I will discuss”) and maintain an academic touch, like a critical-feminist explanation of why fans can’t see Reese Witherspoon as more than a good Southern girl.
Ph.D. programs should be frank with students about their career prospects, Petersen says. Here are her insights on redeeming a broken system, as told to The Chronicle. They have been edited for length and clarity.
Four years ago, Petersen gave up her academic career because she felt she had to.
Here’s the truth: I really wanted to be a professor. My dream was to continue at the visiting professorship that I had. I would have lived in Walla Walla, Wash., written the chance article online for 100 bucks, and taught my classes. That was what I wanted. I had to come up with a contingency plan because that didn’t happen.
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I don’t know how to reconcile how grateful I am for the knowledge I have and the time I spent really digging into and thinking through ideas with the $100,000 I still have in loans. I just started paying down the principal.
The dreams of many Ph.D. students are a long shot, she says, and programs should be more realistic about that.
When you’re a grad student, you have to serve two different masters, because you’re trying to do the things that will get you an academic job, when and if you go on the market. At the same time you need to be building yourself a life raft for the very real not just possibility but probability that you will not gain full-time employment.
A lot of American-studies programs, because of the realities of their market, from the beginning were like: “It’s incredible that you’re here. Your chances of getting a job are basically none. Let’s be realistic about that.”
But most departments aren’t ready to give up that ghost. If you admit to your students from the get-go that doing a very traditional dissertation maybe isn’t in their main interest, it’s hard to keep them on that main path when you admit there’s a secondary path. You also need them as graduate students to stay the course for four years to provide that labor for TA-ships.
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The program at the University of Wisconsin in media studies is incredibly cognizant of the fact that it will only accept the number of people that it can fully, fully fund and put all of its weight behind to get a job. That sometimes meant two people a year. It’s the No. 1 program in media studies, and it’s not just the selectiveness, it’s the job placement. It’s the holistic attention and care that they give to those students.
Lots of programs, and especially English programs, are trying to be more realistic about, as they call them, “alt-ac” jobs. But if you as a student invest too much in that track, that’s essentially admitting that you’re not a very good candidate for an academic job.
She wrote her dissertation on 100 years of the gossip industry, which some scholars may scoff at, despite how many people pay attention to gossip every day.
The thing about interdisciplinary job searches is that half the jobs I applied for were in English departments, a third were in communications departments. Outside of media studies, celebrity studies is really devalued.
The search committee would be a medievalist and a modernist, everyone over the age of 50. Anything that’s popular is threatening, like, “That class will always sell.” It’s easier to dismiss those people and that research.
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She credits graduate school with helping her develop useful skills.
A 360-degree researching ability. Primary sources and secondary sources. The mind-set of, I can’t write about something until I’ve read everything that everyone’s ever written about it. How to gut a book is a skill that’s not explicitly taught in grad school, but you’re implicitly taught to have a 400-page book in front of you and get the major arguments.
Fernanda is the engagement editor at The Chronicle. She is the voice behind Chronicle newsletters like the Weekly Briefing, Five Weeks to a Better Semester, and more. She also writes about what Chronicle readers are thinking. Send her an email at fernanda@chronicle.com.