Stefania Marghitu

Stefania Marghitu received her PhD from the University of Southern California’s Division of Cinema and Media Studies in 2020. Her primary interests deal with critical and cultural studies of television, the showrunner and modes of authorship, production cultures, and feminist media studies. Her first book, Teen TV (Routledge Guidebooks) will be released in May 2021. Her dissertation project is titled Women Showrunners: Authorship, Identity, and Representation in US Television. You can find her work in Feminist Media Studies, Communication, Culture and Critique, The Spectator and the edited collection ReFocus on Amy Heckerling. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Pitzer College, Chapman University and California State University Northridge, and has previously taught at Columbia College Hollywood.

Praise for Teen TV:

“Stefania Marghitu has written the book on the evolution of an often overlooked yet fiercely beloved TV genre, teen television. Teen TV provides a rich and insightful chronological history of the genre from Baby Boomer teen TV to the teen TV of Gen Z by mixing textual, cultural and industrial analysis intersped with illuminating interviews with key producers of the genre. A must read for everyone who’s watched TV as a teenager.”

-Gry C. Rustad, Associate Professor, University of Bergen 

“In Teen TV Stefania Marghitu anchors engaging and accessible genre analysis not to decades but rather to generations. By accentuating generational specificities, cross-generational conflicts, and demographic shifts, Marghitu invites us to consider how different youth cultures are cultivated and chased by the corporate television complex. Attentive to key creatives, series, and episodes, Teen TV crafts a sweeping and swift journey through a television genre that is always on the verge of stirring up a moral panic.”

-Deborah L. Jaramillo, Associate Professor, Boston University

Author of The Television Code: Regulating the Screen to Safeguard the Industry