Elizabeth Patton is Chair and Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies. She received her Ph.D. in 2013 from the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Her research interests center on media history, identity and space, and how media practices have informed popular understandings of work and leisure.
Her book, Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office (Rutgers University Press, 2020), examines how the idea of working within the home was constructed and disseminated in popular culture and by the communication and real estate industries through mass media during the 20th century. Elizabeth’s current book project, Documenting Black Leisure as a Form of Resistance, examines the history of Black leisure and tourism in the US through Jim Crow-era media. She is the recipient of the 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Recent research can be found in edited volumes such as Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (Duke University Press, 2021) and Race and the Suburbs in American Film (SUNY Press, 2021). She is the co-managing editor of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture.