Aviva Dove-Viebahn joined the Film and Media Studies program in the Department of English in 2018, after six years as a faculty fellow in ASU's Barrett Honors College. She earned her doctorate in visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester and her master's in art history at the University of Virginia. Prior to ASU, she taught film, women’s studies and the interdisciplinary humanities at the University of Northern Colorado. She manages the Society for Cinema and Media Studies website and serves as an ex-officio member on its Board of Directors. A contributing editor at Ms. Magazine, she is responsible for its Scholar Writing Program. Ms. Magazine frequently carries her essays and reviews in both its print edition and its online blog.
Dove-Viebahn's academic interests concentrate on contemporary visual art and new media, including film and television; gender and its representation in popular visual culture; and the role of the spectator in the digital age. Her dissertation, supported in part by an American Association of University Women fellowship, interrogated how, over the past decades, television with its ever-growing popularity and pervasiveness significantly influenced the ways we approach and interpret all visual objects in Western culture, from art and film to broadcast imagery and the Internet. In her early published work, she has explored such topics as violence and the gaze in CSI, nostalgia in Mad Men, and queer visibility in The L Word. She recently co-edited (with Karon Jolna) the digital anthology "Gender, Race and Class: From the Pages of Ms. Magazine, 1972-Present" and is currently working on a feminism and media-focused compendium for the same series of course readers. In addition, her scholarly projects in progress include an aesthetic analysis of the Resident Evil films and an interrogation of the concept of “feminine intuition” in action and crime television series.