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About Cory Barker
I'm an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Penn State University and formerly an Assistant Professor of Communication at Bradley University. My research focuses on the legacy media industries' experiments with "new" technology in the distribution, exhibition, and promotional realms. My 2022 book, Social TV: Multi-Screen Content & Ephemeral Culture (University Press of Mississippi) won the Outstanding Book Award from the Media Industries Studies Special Interest Group at the Society for Cinema & Media Studies. I've published popular criticism for TV Guide, Complex, and Vox. I also hosted a chat podcast for CBS Interactive's TV.com from 2015-2016 and developed a podcasting course for Bradley students.
Cory Barker is a faculty member in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University, where he teaches courses on film, television, and digital culture. Newsletter.
NBN Episodes hosted by Cory:
December 10, 2025
Tinsel and Rust
Tinsel and Rust: How Hollywood Manufactured the Rust Belt (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the story of Hollywood's role in the shaping of the Rust Belt in the…
July 23, 2025
Music in Orbit
Years before the advent of music streaming, Sirius and XM established satellite radio services that attracted paying subscribers through their ever-ex…
June 24, 2025
Digital Food TV
Michelle Phillipov's Digital Food TV: The Cultural Place of Food in a Digital Era (Routledge, 2023) explores the new theoretical and political questio…
June 11, 2025
Movie-Made Los Angeles
Los Angeles was a cinematic city long before the rise of Hollywood. By the dawn of the twentieth century, photography, painting, and tourist promotion…
May 13, 2025
Broads, Sisters, Exes
This timely and telling analysis identifies the formal and thematic innovations pioneered by millennial feminists between 2012 and 2020 that have shap…
April 15, 2025
Fan Podcasts
Starting from the observation of the ubiquity of fan podcasts engaging in media commentary, Fan Podcasts: Rewatch, Recap, Review (Routledge, 2024) exp…
March 7, 2025
Making Stereo Fit
Surround sound is often mistaken as a relatively new phenomenon in cinemas, one that emerged in the 1970s with the arrival of Dolby. Making Stereo Fit…
November 12, 2024
Uncomfortable Television
From The Wire to Intervention to Girls, postmillennial American television has dazzled audiences with novelistic seriality and cinematic aesthetics. Y…
November 6, 2024
Performing the News
Elia Powers' book Performing the News: Identity, Authority, and the Myth of Neutrality (Rutgers UP, 2024) explores how journalists from historically m…