Stephanie Ricker Schulte Wins SCMS Dissertation Prize

Stephanie Ricker Schulte has been named the winner of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2010 Dissertation Award. Stephanie's dissertation, "State Technology to State of Being: The Making of the Internet in Global Popular Culture (1980-2000)" was chaired by Prof. Melani McAlister. She will receive the $1,000 award at a ceremony at the annual meeting in Los Angeles, CA, March 17-21.

Stephanie's dissertation was previously awarded the American Studies Association's 2009 Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in American Studies, American Ethnic Studies, or American Women's Studies and an honorable mention in the American Journalism Historians Association's annual Margaret Blanchard Doctoral Dissertation Prize competition. She is currently assistant professor of communication in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas.

The award committee noted that  "The significance of this project lies in its break with dominant teleological and technological histories of the internet in order to write nothing less than the first history of the meanings of the internet and how these various meanings have — at specific points in history — interacted to affect policy. Schulte’s analysis of the cultural history of the internet’s meanings exhibits a deft command of a variety of disciplinary perspectives, theoretical approaches and texts, in so doing serving as an exemplar of the best kind of media and cultural studies which is attentive to texts and their social and historical contexts."