Charlotte E. Howell

Dr. Charlotte E. Howell earned her MA and PhD in media studies from the department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas-Austin. Her areas of specialization include: television studies, media industry studies, genre studies, and fan studies. Dr. Howell was a Television Academy Faculty Fellow in 2017.

She has presented her research at the Flow Conference, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, and Console-ing Passions, the International Conference on Television, Video, Audio, New Media, and Feminism Dr. Howell’s research has been published in the Journal of Religion, Media, and Digital Culture, Critical Studies in Television, Kinephanos, Cinema Journal, and in the anthology Supernatural, Humanity and the Soul: On the Highway to Hell and Back Again. She has been interviewed for her expertise by Marketplace and Bustle.

Her first book, Divine Programming: Negotiating Christianity in American Dramatic Television Production, 1996-2016 (Oxford University Press, 2020) analyzes the changes in the American television industry as it affected the representation of Christianity on prime-time serial dramas. She argues that as the mass audience fractured and upscale niches became more important as television audiences for scripted dramas, Christian representation became ripe for dramatic exploration among shows aimed at secular audiences. However, among those working in the television industry, religion remained potentially dangerous, and thus something to be othered, displaced, and disavowed until it could be distanced enough from the danger to be utilized in a secular context.

Dr. Howell teaches the following courses in the Film and Television Studies program: Understanding TV, TV Genres and Fandom, Streaming TV, Comic Book TV, Religion and TV, Sports and TV.