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Associate Professor
William T. Kemper
Fellow for Excellence in Teaching
Director of Comm 4940 Internships
education: PhD, University of Iowa (1975)
email: PorterMJ@missouri.edu
office: 210B Switzler Hall
phone: 573-882-0525
research interests
focus within the realm of media literacy. He has explored the need
to develop a common language so people can speak intelligently about
television programming. His research has focused on the narrative
structure of primetime television programs. He began by applying
Christian Metz's Grande Syntagmatique to selected television programs (including "Lou Grant"
and "Hill Street Blues") and has recently been interested
in looking at the narrative structure of television's newest genre,
reality narratives. He has also examined issues of representationprimarily
representation of men in the media. This research focuses on use
of self-disclosure of male sitcom characters. His research has been
published in the Journal of Broadcasting
and Electronic Media, Southern
Speech Communication Journal, Journal
of Sex Roles, Journal of Popular
Film and Television, and more.
Michael's contributions to
the university and the discipline have been recognized by many awards,
but it is for his outstanding teaching that Michael is best known.
He was the first recipient of NCA's Outstanding Teaching Award from
the Mass Communication Division (1998), and he has won MU's prestigious
William T. Kemper Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1997 and the
ultra-prestigious Maxine Christopher Shutz Award for Distinguished
Teaching in 2002.
Frequently Taught Courses
Com 2100 Media
Communication in Society
Com 4618 TV Program Analysis & Criticism
Com 8150 Seminar in TV Criticism
Research Interests
Media literacy
Narrative structure of television programs
Representation of men in television sitcoms
Selected Recent Publications
Porter, M. J. (2003). Teaching Television
Criticism. In M. Murray & Roy L. Moore (Eds.), Mass
Communication Education (pp. 323-334). Ames: Iowa State University
Press.
Good, G. E., Porter, M. J., & Dillon, M. G. (2002). When
men divulge: Portrayals of men's self-disclosure on prime-time situation
comedies. Journal of Sex Roles,
46, 419-427.
Porter, M. J., Larson, D. L., Harthcock, A., & Berg Nellis,
K. (2002). Re(de)fining narrative events:
Examining television narrative structure. Journal
of Popular Film and Television, 30, 23-30.
Porter, M. J. (1998). The structure of television
narratives. In L. R. Vande Berg, L. A. Wenner, & B. E.
Gronbeck (Eds.), Television Criticism
(pp. 140-157). Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
Porter, M. J. (1994). The function of scenes
in television narratives. Creative
Screenwriting, 1, 74-116.
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