Calhoun, Claudia
Office: Online (Zoom)
Email: cc9401@hunter.cuny.edu
Claudia Calhoun is a historian of American media. Her research looks at the intersections of media history and U.S. cultural history, with a particular focus on the U.S. postwar period.
Dr. Calhoun is the author of Only the Names Have Been Changed: Dragnet, the Police Procedural, and Postwar Culture (University of Texas Press, 2022), which explores how the pioneering transmedia text used its relationship with the Los Angeles Police Department to inform listeners and viewers about the workings of the justice system and to instruct Americans in their responsibilities as citizens. Recent publications include analyses of race and authorship in Shonda Rhimes’s Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story (published in Adaptation) and John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge (1960) (forthcoming in The Journal of Film and Video).
Her current project, Screen and Stage, looks at live theatrical adaptations of postwar media, considering how these productions ask contemporary audiences to re-experience the historical past, simultaneously through the theatrical present and through their memories of the media being adapted.
Dr. Calhoun received her Ph.D. in American Studies and Film and Media Studies from Yale University and her B.A. in American Studies from Mount Holyoke College. Before coming to Hunter, she taught at Fairfield University, New York University, Skidmore College, and Bates College.