Dr. Maria DeRose’s academic career has taken her on a tour of the Midwest, with a few detours along the way.
After having moved from Chicago to Grand Rapids to attend Calvin College, she took a semester in Hollywood to study and work in the film industry. This Midwest girl realized that the industry wasn’t the place for her after the executive producer at Bette Midler’s production company (where she was interning) yelled “what do you want from me?” when she told them to have a nice weekend. So, back to the Midwest she went to attend Bowling Green State University in Ohio, the top school in the country for popular culture studies and home of the founder of the academic study of popular culture in the United States, of The Center for Popular Culture Studies and of “The Journal of Popular Culture,” Dr. Ray Browne.
While she worked on her Master of Arts in American Cultural Studies, the university thought it a good idea to have her teach her own ACS classes. She enjoyed blending the study of history, sociology, social issues and popular culture into one course.
Her initiative at BGSU—including setting up a summer internship at Caribbean film production company Banyan Productions—plus her coursework, particularly her master’s thesis focusing on racial film stereotypes, impressed the people at BGSU enough that they kept her on for a Ph.D., this time focusing on popular culture as well as on women’s studies. Her passion for teaching flourished as she taught ethnic studies and gender studies classes, even getting to create new courses such as Sex, Gender, and Race in Science Fiction Literature as well as Women in Media, both of which allowed her to teach various aspects of her dissertation topic including feminist science fiction literature and media’s representations of women. She was also pleasantly surprised when her dissertation proposal-turned-article was not only published in “Extrapolation,” the leading academic journal for science fiction studies, but also won the Pioneer Award for Best Article of the Year from the Science Fiction Studies Association.
With diplomas in hand and a reputation for creating new pop culture/media studies courses, she made the next stops on her Midwest tour and took a visiting assistant professor position at Indiana University Bloomington, and then a visiting assistant professor position at Western Illinois University, teaching gender studies, media studies, and popular culture courses, including a new course Tough Girls: Gender, Genre, and Women’s Violence.
Wanting to be more marketable to smaller schools that focus on teaching, she remained at WIU and earned a Master of Arts in English and a Graduate Certificate in Teaching Writing, all while working in the writing center and teaching composition and film courses. Unable to stay away from researching media studies, she wrote her thesis on how film form components add to the ideological messages of films.
Having almost completed her Midwest tour, in 2012 she accepted the position at SMC where she is proud to sit on the Rank and Promotion Committee, to organize various events with the Diversity Committee and to develop and organize Stay, Study, Play Day (the last of which is a bit selfish since she loves bringing the therapy dogs to campus...for the students, of course). Her interdisciplinary degrees now allow her to teach all of her passions: composition, American literature, film, and popular culture. Even out of the classroom, Dr. DeRose brings together her passion for pop culture and for studying culture; she and Natalie Anagnos even presented for SMC’s Academic Lecture Series on how “The Walking Dead” fits with current cultural issues.
Walk past her office door and you run the risk of hearing her discussing anything from thesis statements to psychoanalytic theory to the role of zombies in the cultural zeitgeist...or dogs—she talks a lot about her dog.