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Melissa Click

Dr. Melissa A. Click earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests center on popular culture texts and audiences, particularly texts and audiences disdained in mainstream culture. Her work in this area is guided by audience studies, theories of gender and sexuality, and media literacy. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled: It's 'A Good Thing': The Commodification of Femininity, Affluence and Whiteness in the Martha Stewart Phenomenon , examined Martha Stewart's incredible popularity in the U.S. using both textual analysis and reception studies. Current research projects involve Twilight fans, online fans, masculinity and male fans, messages about class and food in reality television programming, and messages about work in children's television programs.

Melissa's excellence in the classroom has been recognized by the MU Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Women (Tribute to Women, 2004), the Intercollegiate Communication Association/iCom (Outstanding Professor, 2007), MU's College of Arts & Sciences (Purple Chalk Award, 2007), Lamda Pi Eta (Honorary membership, 2008). In 2010, she received the Provost's Outstanding Junior Faculty Teaching Award; and in 2011, MU's Association of Communication Graduate Students recognized her as an “Outstanding Mentor.”

Frequently Taught Courses:
Comm 4618/7618 – Television Program Analysis and Criticism
Comm 4638 – New Technologies and Communication
Comm 4975 – Visual Literacy
Comm 8110 – Intro to Graduate Studies
Comm 8150 – Seminar in Television Criticism
Comm 9530 – Topics in Mass Communication: Cultural Studies, Audiences,
....................& Fans

Research Interests:
Media audiences and fans; Gender, race, class and sexuality in popular culture; Television analysis and criticism; Media literacy

Selected Publications:
Click, M. A., Aubrey, J. S., and Behm-Morawitz, E. (Eds.). (2010). Bitten by Twilight: Youth culture, media, and the vampire franchise. New York: Peter Lang.

Behm-Morawitz, E., Click, M. A., and Aubrey, J. S. (2010). “Relating to Twilight: Fans' Responses to Love and Romance in the Vampire Franchise.” In M. A. Click, J. S. Aubrey & E. Behm- Morawitz (Eds). Bitten by Twilight: Youth culture, media, and the vampire franchise. New York: Peter Lang.

Aubrey, J. S., Walus, S., and Click, M. A. (2010). “Twilight and the Production of the 21 st Century Teen Idol.” In M. A. Click, J. S. Aubrey & E. Behm-Morawitz (Eds). Bitten by Twilight: Youth culture, media, and vampire franchise. New York: Peter Lang.

Aubrey, J. S ., Behm-Morawitz, E ., & Click, M. A. (2010). The romanticization of abstinence: Fan response to sexual restraint in the Twilight series. Transformative Works and Cultures, 5. doi:10.3983/twc.2010.0216. http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/216/184

Click, M. & Ridberg, R. (September 2010). Saving food: Finding the politics of the everyday in food preservation. Environmental Communication, 4 .

Aubrey, J.S., Click, M.A., Dougherty, D.S., Fine, M.A., Kramer, M.W., Meisenbach, R.J., Olson, L.N., & Smythe, M.J. (2008). “We do babies!”: The trials, tribulations, and triumphs of pregnancy and parenting in the academy. Women's Studies in Communication, 31, 186-195.

Click, M. & Kramer, M. W. (2007, December). Reflections on a century of living: Gendered differences in popular songs. Popular Communication, 5, 241-262.

Click, M. (2007). Untidy: Fan response to the soiling of Martha Stewart's spotless image. In J. Gray, C. Sandvoss, & C. L. Harrington (Eds.), Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, pp. 301-315. New York: New York University Press.

Melissa A. Click also writes for the University of Wisconsin, Madison's Antenna and the University of Texas at Austin's Flow .

Melissa Click

Assistant Professor
Director of Comm 1200

education: PhD, University of Massachusets (2008)
email: ClickM@missouri.edu
office: 220 Switzler Hall
phone: 573-884-4694
focus area: Mass Media