Paul Smith

Paul Smith

Paul Smith

Professor

Marxism, political economy and culture, postcolonial studies, globalization, media and technology, critical race and gender theory, art and music industries, theories of culture, Cultural Studies

Paul Smith was educated at Cambridge and at the University of Kent in the UK and has a PhD in American Studies. Most of his working life has been spent in the US, including posts at Miami University OH, and Carnegie Mellon before his appointment to Mason in 1996. Between 1999 and 2002 he was chaired Professor and department head of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex in the UK. At Mason he has been director of the Center for the Study of the Americas and currently teaches mostly in the Cultural Studies PhD program, but also for Global Affairs.

He is the author of Pound Revised, Discerning the Subject, Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production, Millennial Dreams: Culture and Capital in the North, and Primitive America: The Ideology of Capitalist Democracy. He has edited Men in Feminism (with Alice Jardine), Madonnarama (with Lisa Frank), and Boys, and has published a book of translations from Jean Louis Schefer, The Enigmatic Body. His essays and articles have appeared in scores of journals and collections in the US and overseas. He edited The Renewal of Cultural Studies, and most recently edited (with Alexander Monea and Maillim Santiago) Amazon: At the Intersection of Culture and Capital.

He was elected President of the national Cultural Studies Association (2016-18). 

 

 

 

Dissertations Supervised

Shauna Rigaud, Harvesting Home: Economy, Gender and Identity in the Crop Over Festival (2024)

Amy Zhang, Globalizing the Ideology of Art: Art Museums in the Arabian Peninsula (2023)

Ashley Gaddy, Resisting Through 2020: Political Strategies of Black Women Receiving Assistance in the U.S. during Floyd, Trump, and COVID-19 (2023)

Austin Gallas, Value of Surveillance: Private Policing, Bourgeois Reform, and Sexual Commerce in Turn-of-the-Century New York (2022)

David Zeglen, “Uneven and Combined Cultures: The Temporal Ideologies of Modes of Production” (2022)

Austin Gallas, Value of Surveillance: Private Policing, Bourgeois Reform, and Sexual Commerce in Turn-of-the-Century New York (2022)

Lindsey MacDonald, Digital Taylorism and the Algorithmic Imagination: Reconstituting the Conditions of Capital Accumulation After the 2007-9 Financial Crisis (2020)

Caroline West, Picturing Capital: Mass Media and the Art of Visualizing Poverty (2019)

Christine Rosenfeld, Terrains of Occupation and De-Occupation: Stewardship, Recognition, and Cultural Politics in the Saddle Region of Hawai`i Island (2018)

David Rheams, Processing Groundwater: An Analysis of Groundwater Knowledge Infrastructure in Texas (2018)

Andrea Zach, The Cultural Production of Heimat: Citizenship, Immigration and the Political Economy of Shared Frontiers in Europe (2017)

Tainui Neilson, The Labor of Digital Journalism in New Zealand and the US (2017)

Lisa Daily, Ethical Capitalism, Commodities, and the Consumerist Gaze (2017)

Gavin Mueller, The Pirate Mode of Production: Intellectual Property and Labor under Neoliberal Restructuring (2016)

Allison Lakomski, Shopping for Wholeness: The Political Economy of Whole Foods Market and the Commodification of Altruism (2015)

Gyu Tag Lee, De-nationalization And Re-nationalization: The Globalization of K-Pop And New East Asian Identity (2013)

David Arditi, The State of Music: Cultural, Political and Economic Transformations in the Music Industry (2012)

Pia Moller, Patrolling the Nation: The Incorporation of Immigration Control in Neoliberal America (2012)

Fan Yang, Faking China, Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and the Postsocialist State in Globalization (2011)