Andrea L. Press (born 1955) is an American born sociologist and media studies scholar.
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Press received a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987. She has held faculty positions at the University of California, Davis, the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the London School of Economics in a variety of departments such as communications, sociology, writing studies, social psychology, and women’s studies. Presently, she is the chair of the media studies department and professor of sociology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. She has been a co-editor of the academic journal The Communication Review since 1999.
Professor Press is best known for her research addressing feminist media issues and the use of innovative methodology. Her first book, Women Watching Television: Gender, Class, and Generation in the American Television Experience, uses qualitative research methodologies to examine the cultural impact of television among women from working and middle-class backgrounds. As E. Ann Kaplan wrote in the academic journal Signs, “Andrea L. Press's book Women Watching Television is a sophisticated sociological study of class and generational differences in women's responses to television . . . Press builds on prior research through empirical investigation. She combines approaches often hitherto used separately, linking the class emphasis and the hegemony theory in much British cultural studies work with British and American feminist methods” (p. 551). [1]
Professor Press' second book coauthored with Elizabeth R. Cole, Speaking of Abortion: Television and Authority in the Lives of Women, examines women's reactions to a television about abortion using “ethnographic focus groups.” [2] As Nina Eliasoph noted in a review in the American Journal of Sociology, this research has broad interdisciplinary appeal, “For scholars of morality, gender, class, and media reception, the book’s intensive and clever use of interview material offers many provocative and thoughtful challenges” (p. 234). [3]
In addition to several recent articles, in 2010, Professor Press and coauthor Professor Bruce Williams published The New Media Environment: What’s New, What’s Not?
Women Watching Television: Gender, Class, and Generation in the American Television Experience (1991) [4]
Speaking of Abortion: Television and Authority in the Lives of Women (1999)[5]
The New Media Environment: An Introduction (2010)[6]