Graduate Students
Zane Austin Willard
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Contact Information
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Office: CIS 3018
biography
Zane Austin Willard is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. Grounded in a critical cultural tradition, his research examines how surveillance technologies, practices, and logics embedded in popular media—such as reality and scripted television, film, news, social media, video games, AI-images—(re)produce nationalist ideologies that are central to the marginalization of racialized and queer minorities. His dissertation, Queer Patriots: Reactionary Homonationalism in Surveillance Culture, examines how hypervisible LGBTQ+ figures in popular media become evidence of U.S. freedom and social progress through opaque performances of national identity while recasting immigrant, trans, and gender nonconforming communities as national threats amid intensifying reactionary politics.
Zane’s scholarship has been published in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Communication, Culture & Critique, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Communication Teacher, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Society among others, as well as three edited collections. He has presented his work at the annual conventions of the National Communication Association, Society of Cinema and Media Studies, American Studies Association, and the Southern States Communication Association. He is the 2025 recipient of the Distinguished Journal Article Award from NCA's Philosophy of Communication, Theory, and Critique Division as well as Top Paper Awards from NCA’s LGBTQ Caucus and SSCA’s Gender Studies Division.
Zane earned his M.A. in Communication from USF and his B.A. from the University of Tampa in Economics, Communication, and Film & Media Arts, with minors in Art History & Cinema Studies.
Research areas
Critical Cultural Studies, Media, Surveillance, LGBTQ+ Popular Culture, Nationalism, Queer Theory, Race, Citizenship
Advisor
Aisha Durham