Jeremy Packer
Associate Professor
Ph.D., University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, 2001

EMAIL

Jeremy Packer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and the Director of the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media PhD Program. He is also a faculty member in the Science, Technology, and Society program. He currently teaches undergraduate courses in critical media analysis and cultural studies, though he has also taught courses in surveillance, cinema, and media history. His graduate courses cover such topics as cultural studies, communications theory, qualitative research methods, network society, technology, and the work of Michel Foucault. Dr. Packer has been active in graduate advising and research at both Penn State and North Carolina State.

Dr. Packer's research areas are cultural studies and communications technologies. More specifically, he has considered the interrelationships of communications and transportation technologies and the political implications that arise from their use and governance. In particular he has looked at the historical formations of safety and security as the means for justifying and organizing automotive governance. He has published on these and other topics in Cultural Studies, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, The Communication Review, and a number of collected volumes. He is also the author or co-editor of the following books.

Mobility Without Mayhem: Cars, Safety and Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2008) provides a cultural history spanning the 1950s to the present of how automotive conduct was reorganized by safety concerns having to do with women drivers, motorcylists, hitchhikers, African American drivers (DWB), truckers, road ragers, and most recently car bombers. These mass-mediated safety crises, it is argued, have provided justification for surveillance and control technologies and tactics that are reorienting people's mobility and their understanding of fear.

Thinking With James Carey: Essays on Communications, Transportation, History (Peter Lang, 2006), co-edited with Craig Robertson, investigates the ongoing application and extension of the work of the late James Carey. The book includes eight original essays by communications scholars and historians as well as two interviews with James Carey conducted in 2004 by Lawrence Grossberg.

Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality (SUNY Press, 2003), co-edited with Jack Bratich and Cameron McCarthy, assesses Michel Foucault's work on governmentality and applies it to cultural studies in general and the U.S. context in particular.

Secret Agents: The Many Changing Faces of a Pop-Culture Icon (Peter Lang, Forthcoming), co-edited with Theodore Bailey, is a collected volume that attempts to update the seminal work by Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond (Palgrave, 1987), by investigating new popular culture iterations of the secret agent as they proliferate across film and television.

He also serves as the Book Review Editor for the journal Communication Review and serves as an the Editorial Boards of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies and Communication Inquiry.