Amanda Ciafone

Amanda Ciafone serves as Associate Professor across multiple units at the University of Illinois including the Department of Media & Cinema Studies, Institute of Communications Research, History department, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Her interdisciplinary scholarship bridges cultural history, political economy, and media studies with particular emphasis on capitalism's cultural manifestations and corporate power structures.

Professor Ciafone earned her PhD and MA in American Studies from Yale University and BA in American Civilization from Brown University. Her educational foundation informs her critical approach to understanding American culture within transnational contexts, especially regarding Latin America.

As a cultural historian of capitalism, Ciafone examines how media constructs meaning around economic systems and social relations. Her research spans cultural history of the United States in global contexts, political economy of media industries, and social movement responses to corporate power. She currently pioneers work in humanistic aging studies, investigating technology's relationship with old age while co-editing the 'Geopolitics of Information' book series on critical media studies.

Ciafone's publications demonstrate consistent engagement with corporate-cultural dynamics, from historical analyses of Coca-Cola's global expansion to contemporary examinations of aging and care work. Her scholarship reveals how media representations shape economic understanding while highlighting social movement resistance to corporate narratives across different historical periods.

Her scholarly excellence has been recognized through prestigious awards:

• Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study (2020-2021)
• Faculty Fellow, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (2017-2018)
• Media & Cinema Studies Teaching Award (2016-2018)
• Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities Prize (2014-2015)
• Fellow of the John W. Kluge Center at Library of Congress (2013-2014)
• Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2021)

As Director of Graduate Studies for the Institute of Communications Research, Ciafone mentors emerging scholars while developing innovative curricula that connect media literacy with critical economic analysis. Her teaching spans 500-student lectures and intimate seminars, with particular commitment to serving underrepresented students through publicly engaged pedagogy. She actively bridges academic research with public understanding, as demonstrated by her feature in Fox Nation's 'A History of the World in Six Glasses' (2022) where she shared Coca-Cola expertise, and through multimedia resources like the Scalar digital companion to 'Counter-Cola'.