Skip to main content
Northwestern School of Communication

Janice Radway

Professor Emerita
Janice Radway

Janice Radway is the Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication Studies and a professor of American studies and gender studies within the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She is also the director of the Rhetoric and Public Culture Program within the communication studies department. Radway is widely known for her scholarship on readers, reading, books, and the history of middlebrow culture. She has served as the editor of American Quarterly, the official journal of the American Studies Association. She is also the author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, which recently won the Fellows Book Award as a "classic" in the field from the International Communication Association, and A Feeling for Books: The Book- of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle Class Desire. In addition, Radway co-edited American Studies: An Anthology and Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1945, which is Volume IV of A History of the Book in America. Currently, Radway is working on an oral history of girls, their underground publishing efforts during the 1990s, and their subsequent lives. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and has lectured widely throughout the U.S. and internationally. She is a past president of the American Studies Association and professor emerita at Duke University, where she taught for twenty years and served as chair of the literature program.

Education

PhD, English (American Studies Program), Michigan State University

MA, English, State University of New York at Stony Brook

BA, English with Highest Honors, Michigan State University

Recent Awards, Honors and Grants

2012 – Fellows Book Award for Reading the Romance, International Communication Association

2012 – Clarence Simon Award for Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring, School of Communication, Northwestern University

2011 – The Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to American Studies

2011 – The Open Field Award for Impact on the Field of Communication Studies, International Communication Association

2010-2011 – Honor Roll, ASG Faculty and Administrator Award, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University, for American Studies

2009 – Honorary Doctor of Philosophy, The Faculty of the Arts, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

Recent and Forthcoming Publications

Interview with Jon Cruz, European Journal of Cultural Studies June, 2012.

"From the Underground to the Stacks and Beyond: Girl Zines, Zine Librarians, and the Importance of Itineraries through Print Culture," in Libraries in the History of Print Culture, edited by Christine Pawley (University of Wisconsin Press, in press).

"Zines Then and Now: What Are They? What Do You Do With Them, How Do They Work?," in Reading the Readers, edited by Anouk Lang (University of Massachusetts Press, in press).

"Zines, Half Lives and Afterlives," PMLA (Spring, 2011), 140-50.

"The Body Project of Girl Zines," (2010) in "Bodytalk," edited by Lisa Henderson, International Journal of Communication, 4. http://ijoc.org/ojs/index/php.ijoc

"Learned and Literary Print Cultures in an Age of Professionalization and Diversification," in Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1940, edited by Carl Kaestle and Janice Radway (The University of North Carolina Press, 2009).