Narrative

Shayla Thiel-Stern teaches coursework that covers how the changing media environment and the production and consumption of digital media affects culture and society today. Her research--which questions the critical intersections of youth, interactive media and gender--uses ethnographic and historical methods as well as content analysis to understand how digital media both shapes and is shaped by culture and audiences. Her first book, Instant Identity: Adolescent Girls and the World of Instant Messaging (2007, Peter Lang), exposed how youth use interactive media to negotiate gender and sexual identity and navigate their social worlds through new media. Her upcoming book, From the Dance Hall to Facebook: Gendered Moral Panic About American Teen Girls in Public Recreational Space, 1905-2010 (forthcoming, University of Massachusetts Press), argues that the news media has used the same newsgathering and storytelling techniques to trivialize and marginalize teen girls by focusing on several examples over the past century.

She previously worked at washingtonpost.com, Edmunds.com, cars.com and Iowa Public Radio, and contributed to CNN.com, Britannica, The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She served as editor of The Journal of Communication Inquiry, and has published scholarly research in Feminist Media Studies, Women's Studies in Communication, and Girlhood Studies, as well as in several edited books.

She earned a Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Iowa and an M.A. in Communication, Culture and Technology from Georgetown University.