Faculty

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Julie Dobrow

Children and media; ethnicity/gender and media; adolescents and media use; women's history and biography I am currently working on a three-tiered interdisciplinary research project along with Chip Gidney, Mary Casey, and Cynthia Smith at Eliot-Pearson, as well as faculty in several other departments at Tufts. The first piece of this project is a long-running content analysis of children's animated programming. We are updating prior work we've done that investigates images of race, ethnicity and gender in children's animated programming using both content and sociolinguistic analysis. The second part of this research is an exploration of why stereotyping persists in children's media. We are examining this through intensive interviews with content creators, writers, directors, vocal casting directors, and actors. The third part of the project is empirical research we're conducting with children, to see how children make sense of gender, race, and ethnicity in the animated programs they see. My applied work includes doing many media literacy workshops for parents and for children and for children in a variety of settings, and consulting work with colleagues at GBH, one of the leading creators of children's educational media. I have written about children and media issues in a variety of academic and popular venues. My other research is historical in nature. I serve as co-PI, along with Jennifer Burton, of the Half the History Project at Tufts, which utilizes short-form biography, film, and podcast to tell the untold and under-told stories of women's lives. I've written one biography of the relatively unknown mother/daughter team who made Emily Dickinson into one of the most-known women anywhere in the world. After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet was published by WW Norton in 2018. My next dual biography, Crossing Indian Country: From the Wounded Knee Massacre to the Unlikely Marriage of Ohíye'Sa, Charles Alexander Eastman, will be published by NYU Press in Fall 2025.