Helen Wood

Department of Media, Film and Journalism

Reader in Media and Communication

Contact Details: 
Telephone:  0116 2551 551 ext 6828
Email: hwood@dmu.ac.uk

Helen Wood has previously lectured in Media Studies and Sociology at the Universities of Manchester, Birmingham, University College Worcester, Wolverhampton and Glasgow.

Her main interests are in television studies, media theory, gender and social change, and audience studies. She is interested in methodological innovation to capture television (and convergent media) relationships with audiences. Her method ‘text-in-action’ has been applied to talk shows, reality television and digital television use. Her main publications are Talking With Television: Women, talk shows and self-reflexivity, in press with University of Illinois, and she has co-edited 2 volumes of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Working Papers for Routledge (2007).

She has recently completed an ESRC funded project as part of the ‘Identities and Social Action Programme’ with Professor Beverley Skeggs at Goldsmiths College, London. ‘Making Class and Self through Televised Ethical Scenarios’ is a textual and audience analysis of reality television. (www.identities.org)

With Dr Rachel Moseley and Dr Helen Wheatley (Warwick University) she will soon undertake a new AHRC funded project: ‘A History of Television for Women in Britain: 1947-1989’

She is also assistant editor of the journal Ethnography (www.eth.sagepub.com) and Associate Editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies.

She is a member of the Ross Priory Broadcast Talk research group, the Midlands Television Research Group based at Warwick and an affiliated member of CRESC, ESRC Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change (Manchester and Open Universities).

Helen Wood is interested in supervising dissertation students in areas of media theory, discourse analysis, television, gender studies, media reception and use.

Research and Publications