Stacy Takacs

author of Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America

February 4, 2013

Stacy Takacs (PhD, Indiana University) is Associate Professor and Director of American Studies at Oklahoma State University. She is also a core member of the programs in Screen Studies and Gender and Women's Studies at OSU. Her research interests include contemporary American culture, television and media studies, and the intersections of popular and political cultures. She has written on the cultural mediation of a variety of political topics ranging from the Drug War to the New Economy and the War on Terrorism in journals such as Cultural Critique, Spectator: Journal of Film and Television Criticism, Feminist Media Studies, and Cultural Studies. Her book-length study of post-9/11 US television, entitled Terrorism TV, was published by University Press of Kansas in 2012, and she is currently working on an project called Interrogating Popular Culture, which is under contract at Routledge.

Terrorism TV is the first comprehensive analysis of security themes in post-9/11 American television. It examines programs that comment both directly and allegorically on the post-9/11 world to show how entertainment programming helped build a national consensus favoring a War on Terror. It offers a convincing case that popular television helped organize public feelings of loss, fear, empathy, and self-love into narratives supportive of a controversial and unprecedented war.

Terrorism TV covers an array of program genres spanning the past decade of the on-going conflict and mixes touchstone texts
like 24, JAG and Rescue Me with lesser known but relevant series like Over There, Jericho and Six Feet Under to show how entertainment programming staged an imaginative debate (within certain ideological limits) about the policies pursued in the name of the War on Terror. In all, it offers fresh insight into how American television directly and indirectly reinforced the Bush administration's security agenda and argues for the continued importance of the medium as a tool of collective identity formation. It is an essential guide to the televisual landscape of American consciousness in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2013-honorees/stacy-takacs

Last Updated: 12 January 2022