Dissertation Title:

Blake Karsten Beaver is a PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary Program in Literature at Duke University and a scholar of media history, theory, and criticism. His research addresses the intermedial relations between 20th- and 21st-century audiovisual media, with a particular focus on television and the medium’s positioning within our broader thinking around technology, politics, genre, gender, and sexuality. His dissertation, Residues of the Televisual Family: Technological Allegory in the U.S. Family Drama, 2001-2023, examines the complex relationships between technological change and cultural ideals of the family in the United States since the digital turn. Focusing on Six Feet Under, Brothers & Sisters, Friday Night Lights, and Succession, Blake argues that the changing technologies of television distribution produce new cultural imaginaries of the American family. More generally, Blake's interests include television, new media, gender & sexuality, and genre studies (drama, reality TV, soap opera, and telenovela). 

Before beginning his graduate career, Blake worked as a media practitioner, planning and buying print, TV, and digital media at advertising agencies in New York and Chicago on behalf of telecom, building materials, and insurance brands.

Recent Publications

1. Beaver, BK. "The Kardashians, Live! Fabricating Liveness in the Sex-Tape-Derived Reality Series." Television and New Media  (January, 2024). [doi] [abs]
2. Beaver, B, Howard L. Kaye, Freud as a Social and Cultural Theorist: On Human Nature and the Civilizing Process. Psychoanalysis and History 24:1 (2022): 114-118.
3. Beaver, B. "Feel-Sad TV: Sadness Pornography in Contemporary Serials." disClosure 28 (December, 2019): 1-12. [doi] [abs]