Andrea L. Press

Andrea Lee Press is an American born sociologist and media studies scholar. She is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Media Studies and Sociology at the University of Virginia.

Press received a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987. She has held faculty positions at the University of California, Davis, the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Hebrew University and the London School of Economics in a variety of departments such as communications, sociology, writing studies, social psychology, and women’s studies. Presently, she is a professor of Media Studies and Sociology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. She has been a co-editor of the academic journal The Communication Review since 1999. Press has been a fellow at the Oxford Center for International Gender Research, the Yale Center for Comparative Research, the Center for Advanced Study of the University of Illinois, the Stanhope Center for Communications Policy Research, the in London, and the VIrginia Foundation for the Humanities. She is the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Soroptimist International Foundation. Press is the recipient of the Arnold O. Beckman Award for the best research proposal submitted at the University of Illinois. Her book Women Watching Television was nominated for the Jessie Bernard Award by the American Sociological Association, an award given in recognition of scholarly work that has enlarged the horizons of sociology to encompass fully the role of women in society.

Professor Press is best known for her research addressing feminist media issues and the innovative use of qualitative methodology. Her first book, Women Watching Television: Gender, Class, and Generation in the American Television Experience, uses qualitative research methodologies to examine the cultural impact of television among women from working and middle-class backgrounds. As E. Ann Kaplan wrote in the academic journal Signs, “Andrea L. Press's book Women Watching Television is a sophisticated sociological study of class and generational differences in women's responses to television . . . Press builds on prior research through empirical investigation. She combines approaches often hitherto used separately, linking the class emphasis and the hegemony theory in much British cultural studies work with British and American feminist methods” (p. 551).

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