Amanda D. Lotz is a professor in the Departments of Communication Studies and Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan. She earned a Ph.D. in Radio-Television-Film and certificate in women’s studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000, and completed a two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Television Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on U.S. television, specifically the industrial shifts since the end of the network era and on representations of gender on television and in the media.

A revised, second edition of her CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award-winning book,The Television Will Be Revolutionized was published in late 2014. The Television Will Be Revolutionized explores television’s industrial changes from the mid 1980s through 2014 and how those changes adjust television’s role as a cultural institution. She also published Cable Guys: Television and American in 2014, which examines the negotiation of masculinities across a range of television programming in the early 2000s.

Amanda also published two co-authored books, Understanding Media Industries (Oxford University Press, 2012, second revised edition January 2016) with Timothy Havens, an introduction to key areas central to the analysis of media industries, and Television Studies: A Short Introduction (Polity, 2011), with Jonathan Gray, an overview of the intellectual development of television studies. She edited the collection Beyond Prime-Time: Television After the Network Era (Routledge, 2009), which brings together established television scholars writing new chapters in their areas of expertise that reconsider how programming forms other than prime-time series (such as sports, news, soap operas, and made-for-television movies, among others) have been affected by the wide-ranging industrial changes instituted over the past twenty years.

Amanda also continues to explore representations and discourses related to gender and feminism in the media, as she did in her first book, Redesigning Women: Television after the Network Era (University of Illinois Press, 2006), which explores the rise of female-centered dramas and cable networks targeted toward women in the late 1990s as they relate to changes in the U.S. television industry. She has published articles in: Critical Studies in Media Communication; Communication, Culture, Critique; Feminist Media Studies; Media, Culture and Society; Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture; Communication Theory; Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media; Television & New Media; Screen; Journal of Popular Film and Television; and Women and Language. Her work also appears in edited collections including: How to Watch TV, edited by Jason Mittell and Ethan Thompson (New York University Press, 2013); Making Media Work: Cultures of Management in the Entertainment Industries, edited by Derek Johnson, Derek Kompare, and Avi Santo (New York University Press, 2014); Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, edited by Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John Caldwell (Routledge, 2009); Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, edited by Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas (New York University Press, 2006); NBC: America’s Network, edited by Michele Hilmes  (University of California Press); The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed, edited by Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder (SUNY Press, 2005); Race/Gender/Media: Considering Diversity Across Audiences, Content, and Producers, edited by Rebecca Ann Lind (Allyn & Bacon, 2003); A Handbook of Media Research Methodology (with Horace Newcomb), edited by Klaus Bruhn Jensen (Routledge, 2011, 2002); and she contributed the entries on Ally McBeal, Darren Star, Lifetime Television, Sex and the City, and Women’s Entertainment Television to the Encyclopedia of Television, 2nd ed., edited by Horace Newcomb (Routledge, 2004).

Amanda’s honors include a Mellon post-doctoral fellowship, membership in Phi Beta Kappa, and receipt of the Harold E. Fellows Scholarship from the Broadcasting Education Association in 1994 for study and work in broadcasting. She was named Coltrin Professor of the Year by the International Radio and Television Society in 2004 for her case study exploring the redefinition of television. She is a past chair of the Television Studies Interest Group for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies and served as book review editor for Cinema Journal. She serves on the editorial board of Popular Communication: International Journal of Media and Culture, Media Industries Journal, Cinema Journal, and Feminist Media Histories. Her regular teaching assignments include: Understanding Media Industries; Critical Issues in Television: Post-Network Era; Gender and Media; History of Broadcasting and Television; Feminist Media Studies/Gender and Media (Grad); Analyzing Media Industries (Grad).

She lives in Ann Arbor. Her joys include her husband, two children, swimming with the master’s swim team, baked goods, and summer in Michigan.