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. His research sits at the intersection of media and cultural studies, surveillance studies, and sexuality studies, examining how the regulation of sexuality shapes privilege and marginalization. His work asks how cultural logics of surveillance—embedded in popular media such as film, reality TV, journalism, AI-images, and social media—produce and contest norms of sexual citizenship in the national imaginary. His dissertation, Queer Patriots: Homonational Citizenship in Surveillance Culture, develops "queer patriotism" as a framework for understanding how LGBTQ+ communities negotiate conditional belonging within the nation-state, and how those negotiations are always exclusionary, contingent, and shaped by race, sexuality, and national identity.

Zane's scholarship has been published in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Communication, Culture & Critique, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, and the Journal of Communication Inquiry, among others, as well as three edited collections and the forthcoming Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Society. 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 and the 2024 Top Paper Award from NCA's LGBTQ Caucus.

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

Cultural Studies, Media, Surveillance, Sexuality, Race, Citizenship

Advisor

Aisha Durham