About Me

steve-spence-head-shot
Dr. Steve Spence
Professor of Media Studies
PhD, U Florida, 1999

Teaching

Links to the syllabi for my Fall 2023 courses are available in the header. In addition, I supervise the CMS 3901 internships.

Other recent courses include Zombies on Screens, Storytelling in Video Games and Introduction to Game Studies.

Contact Information

My contact information is collected on a separate page.

Research

My article “Adaptation, Violence, and Storytelling in The Last of Us,” on the video games and the HBO television series, has been accepted for publication in Games and Culture, pending minor revisions. In 2022 and 2023 I presented on these games at annual conferences of the Popular Culture Association.

In August 2021 I contributed to and curated a theme week for In Media Res called “Transmedia Vikings.” In 2017 I published two articles on Mathieu Kassovitz’s film La Haine:

These developed from a paper, “Hip Hop Aesthetics in La Haine,” delivered at the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Other recent papers focused on film and television include “Eyes on the Prize and the Music of Black Power” (SCMS 2016) and two on Upstream Color.

My paper “History with a Soundtrack: YouTube, Vernacular History, and Tupac Shakur” is included in the conference proceedings from the first Tupac Amaru Shakur Collection Conference. My book chapter “The Virtual Spaces of Civil Rights” appeared in volume 2 of Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Wallflower – Columbia UP, 2012). My article “Globalization and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement” appeared in Public Culture (23.3).

Service

I coordinate our department’s BA in Communication and Media Studies. In addition to other duties, for five years I chaired the university’s Information Technology Council and current serve as a council member.

I am a member of Clayton State’s chapter of AAUP, the American Association of University Professors.