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

With a background in the world of theatrical entertainment and lighting design, my scholarship looks at film, television, and media from the perspective of rhetorical studies.

Much of my work considers sites of intersectional identity, especially through the lenses of queer theory and queer rhetorics. I have a particular interest in horror and iterations of the Gothic, as well as cult media, inter- and metatextuality, and the grotesque. My theatrical design training informs my analyses of visual media and culture, and I have published on works such as Get Out, Cabin in the Woods, Hannibal, Supernatural, Justified, and more. My current research focuses on queer and transgressive rhetorics in contemporary horror television.

I am actively involved with several media studies organizations; I serve as the chair for the Southern Gothic area for the Popular Culture / American Culture Association of the South, as well as the president of the Association for the Study of Buffy+. I am also a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Bloomsbury Press’s “B-TV: Television Under the Critical Radar” book series. My doctoral work is in the English Department at Georgia State University, with a focus on rhetoric and composition. I’m a graduate of the English MA program at Middle Tennessee State University; my Master’s thesis, directed by the late Dr. David Lavery, focused on the grotesque in Sofia Coppola’s “Young Girls” trilogy of films.

I have given numerous talks at both US and UK conferences, including the Popular Culture Association, Fear 2000, SAMLA, LIT-TV at Edinburgh Napier University, and Slayage. My public scholarship includes a recent invited lecture on camp and queer sensibilities for The Black Museum in Toronto, as well as film introductions, podcast appearances, guest blogs, and other mediums and projects that bridge the divide between academic and public spaces. 

I am a Lecturer in English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, where I teach courses in composition, rhetoric, critical theory, and film and television. Like many academics, I am overly fond of both cats and coffee.

My pronouns are she/ her/ hers.