Stephanie A. Graves is a media scholar focusing on rhetoric in film, television, and popular culture.

I’ve long been fascinated by the stories we tell about monsters, outsiders, and things that refuse to behave properly.

My scholarship examines film, television, and other popular media through the lenses of rhetorical studies, queer theory, and visual culture, with a particular focus on horror and iterations of the Gothic. I’m interested in the ways popular media construct and contest identity, power, desire, and transgression, particularly where identities and systems of power intersect. My work also engages with cult media, inter- and metatextuality, adaptation, and the grotesque. My background in theatrical entertainment and lighting design shapes the way I approach visual media: I’m particularly interested in how lighting, production design, framing, and other visual elements participate in a text’s rhetorical work. I have published on Get Out, The Cabin in the Woods, Hannibal, Supernatural, Justified, Shirley Jackson, and other TV, film, and literary texts. My current research focuses on queer and transgressive rhetorics in contemporary horror television.

Alongside my research, I’m actively involved in academic publishing and organizations devoted to popular culture and media studies. I’m a Series Co-Editor for Bloomsbury’s “B-TV: Television Under the Critical Radar” book series. I also serve as Chair of the Southern Gothic area for the Popular/American Culture Association in the South, as well as Vice President/President-Elect of the organization. I’m a former President of the Association for the Study of Buffy+ and am also active in the national Popular/American Culture Association and the Society for the Study of the American Gothic. These roles reflect my broader investment in creating spaces for scholarship on popular media, particularly work that takes seriously texts, genres, audiences, and perspectives that have historically existed at the margins of academic study.

My doctoral work in English with a focus in Rhetoric and Composition at Georgia State University brings together my interests in rhetoric, media, identity, and popular culture. I also hold an MA in English from Middle Tennessee State University, where my master’s thesis, directed by the late David Lavery, examined the grotesque in Sofia Coppola’s “Young Girls” trilogy. Across my research, I remain especially interested in what supposedly disreputable, excessive, strange, or marginal forms of popular culture can tell us about the cultures that produce and consume them.

I’ve presented my research at conferences in the U.S. and the U.K., including the Popular Culture Association, SAMLA, LIT-TV at Edinburgh Napier University, Fear 2000, Slayage, CCCC, and Computers & Composition. I also believe strongly in scholarship that circulates beyond traditional academic publications and conferences. My public scholarship includes lectures for Profs & Pints on horror film and literature, the Southern Gothic, and ghost stories; an invited lecture on camp and queer sensibilities for Toronto’s Black Museum; and film introductions, podcast appearances, guest essays, and other projects that bridge academic and public conversations about media and culture.

I currently teach English full time at Columbia State Community College and teach as an adjunct at Middle Tennessee State University. When I’m not teaching, writing, or overanalyzing deeply cursed pieces of media, I can generally be found in the company of cats and an unreasonable amount of coffee.

My pronouns are she/ her/ hers.