Dr. Melissa R. Meade is an Assistant Professor of Communication Technologies at Seton Hall University. Her research interests include the impact of technology on work, labor, environment, and economic modernization and decline; gender, language, culture, and identity; community engagement; and critical/cultural communication. Her book project is an ethnography of the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania and its diaspora in which she investigates the many ways that global capitalism reorganizes social difference through its regimes of resource extraction, labor displacement, and environmental classism. She founded a public digital humanities forum (see https://anthracitecoalregion.org/) on which community members contributed their first-hand stories and artifacts illustrating life in the Anthracite Region. Her work bridges the gap between virtual and offline ethnography and highlights the counternarratives that residents of the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania tell about the lived experiences of deindustrialization. Dr. Meade received the Constance Coiner Award in Working Class Studies, the Best Dissertation Award in Ethnography from the National Communication Association, the Donald P. Cushman Memorial Award from the National Communication Association (the highest student honor from the National Communication Association), and a Top Competitive Paper in Ethnography from the National Communication Association. She also has won several awards for “Top Journal Article of the Year” from National Communication Association.
She has been a fellow of Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Rotary Foundation, and a grantee of the Waterhouse Family Institute for the Study of Communication and Society at Villanova University, as well as a University Fellow at Temple University. Her research has also been supported by the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation and the Philadelphia Mayor’s Commission. She is currently a recipient of the National Communication Association Advancing the Discipline Grant. Her research has been published in a number of outlets including Cultural Studies, Discourse & Communication, CineJ Cinema Journal, The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods, and in edited volumes. She has work under revision for Media, War, & Conflict.
Before pursuing a career in academia, Dr. Meade worked and studied in various areas of communication including public communication, intercultural communication, media, and language. She earned a Ph.D. in Media and Communication from the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University, a master’s degree in education in Intercultural Communication and a Graduate Certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, a Postgraduate Diploma in Intercultural Studies from the University of the Basque Country, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain, and a bachelor’s degree from Albright College. She speaks fluent Spanish.
Prior to coming to Seton Hall University, she was a visiting assistant professor of Digital Media and Ethnography at Allegheny College, a visiting assistant professor of Communication at Villanova University; and she taught Communication and liberal arts courses at Temple University, the University of the Arts (Philadelphia), and Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), Querétaro, Mexico.