Renée Pastel is Assistant Professor of Screen Studies in the Communication Department at Boston College. She earned her MA and PhD in Film & Media from University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in New Media. Her areas of specialization include: film and media theory, cultural memory and media, television studies, and transmedia.
Dr. Pastel's research broadly considers the blurring of fact and fiction in contemporary media consumption and its effect on cultural memory. She is currently working on a manuscript examining narrative figures across “War on Terror” media and the ways in which genre conventions serve to mask the fracturing of national identity. Her essay “Hashtag Television: On-Screen Branding, Second-Screen Viewing, and Emerging Modes of Television Audience Interaction” was included in #identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sex and Nation (U of Michigan Press 2019), and her essay, "The Veteran Reintegrated in You’re the Worst and One Day at a Time" is forthcoming in Open Philosophy.
