Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies Racquel Gates is co-editing a book series for Duke University Press called Console-ing Passions: Television and Cultural Power.
The series, which examines television’s significance as a form of cultural expression, builds on scholarship presented at Console-ing Passions, a conference founded in 1989 by a group of feminist media scholars and artists looking to create a space to present work and foster feminist scholarship on issues of television, culture, and identity.
Titles in the book series include Aids TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video by Alexandra Juhasz, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space by Anna McCarthy, Camp TV: Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History by Quinlan Miller and more.
Racquel Gates received her PhD from Northwestern University’s department of Screen Cultures. She also holds an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago and a BS in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. Her research focuses on Blackness and popular culture, with special attention to discourses of taste and quality. She is the author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke, 2018), where she argues that some of the most disreputable representations in Black popular culture can strategically pose questions about Blackness, Black culture, and American society. In 2020, she was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She used the grant to support work on her next book, Hollywood Style and the Invention of Blackness. Committed to bringing together film studies in an academic context and film appreciation in more popular settings, Gates maintains a robust public engagement. Her work appears in both scholarly and popular publications, some of which include The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Film Quarterly, Television & New Media, as well as other journals and collections. She is also a regular contributor to numerous podcasts, television programs, and recorded film interviews.
