About Jennifer

Jennifer Gillan is Professor of English and Media Studies at Bentley University in the Boston area. For EMS, she coordinates the Creative Industries major, the university’s first hybrid A&S/ Business major, and teaches Media Industry Convergence and the Television Industry. She also teaches literary and cultural history courses such as American Icons and Sitcom Nation: the American Family in Fiction & Film. She received a 2015 Outstanding Scholarly Achievement Award and a 2011 Excellence in Scholarship Award from Bentley, and was named a 2008-09 Faculty Fellow of Bentley’s Valente Center for the Arts and Sciences.

Gillan’s current areas of research are the U.S. television and film industries and Media Industry Convergence, with specific focus on content-promotion hybrids. These include film trailers, the Disneyland TV series, Disney Channel special programming, Mad-vertising for AMC’s Mad Men, the Ricky Nelson videos on The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, and various new media television strategies for engaging audiences. Her current book is Television Brandcasting: The Return of the Content-Promotion Hybrid (Routledge 2015), which was named a Choice recommended title. Her first television studies book, Television and New Media: Must-Click TV (Routledge 2010, has been widely cited in media studies and recommended by New Media & Society, Critical Studies in Television, Transformative Works and Culture, and Popular Communication, among others.

With Maria Mazziotti Gillan, she coedited three award-winning multicultural literature collections for Penguin Books: Unsettling America, named an American Library Association, Outstanding Book Selection; Growing Up Ethnic in America, honored with Booklist’s Outstanding Books Award; Identity Lessons, named to the New York Public Library's Year 2000 Books. For Rutgers University Press, the Gillans and Edvige Giunta coedited Italian American Writers on New Jersey. It received the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Award and a Commendation/ Subvention, National Italian American Heritage Institute.

Gillan’s book chapters have appeared in Understanding Reality TV, The Great American Makeover, Reading Makeover Television, Teen Television, and Analyzing Mad Men, among other anthologies.

She has published articles in Cinema Journal, American Literature, American Drama, African American Review, Arizona Quarterly, Columbia Journal of Gender and the Law, Duke Journal of Gender, Law, & Policy, North Dakota Quarterly, and Mosaic.

Her reviews and essays have appeared in Journal of American History, Cinema Journal, MELUS: The Journal of the Multi Ethnic Literature Association of the U.S., Louisiana Literature, and American Book Review.

Gillan has received faculty fellowships from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation, the International Radio and Television Society’s Disney Impact Summit, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and the Free University of Berlin's Collaborative Research Centre. During her research for Television and New Media: Must-Click TV, she received an invitation to attend the National Association of Television Program Executives Marketplace and Conference.

AWARDS AND HONORS

2016, International Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Univeristy of Warwick
2015, Recommended Title, Television Brandcasting, Choice
2015, Outsanding Scholarly Achievement, Bentley University
2011, Excellence in Scholarship Award, Bentley University 
2010, Faculty Seminar Fellow, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation
2009, Faculty Fellow for 2008-9, Valente Center for the Arts and Sciences
2009, Bentley Publication Awards, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, Bentley University
2009, Faculty Fellow, Disney Impact Summit , Walt Disney Company
2004, New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Award for Italian American Writers on New Jersey
2003, Commendation/Subvention, National Italian American Heritage Inst. for Italian American Writers on NJ (Rutgers 2003)
2000, New York Public Library's Year 2000 Books, Awarded to Identity Lessons
1999, American Library Association, Outstanding Book Selection, awarded to Unsettling America
1999, Booklist, 1999 Outstanding Books Award for Growing Up Ethnic in America
1997, Rauch Grant, for Creation of American Frontier Fictions Course with visual component