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Heather Hendershot studies TV news, conservative media, political movements, and American film and television history. Her courses emphasize the interplay between creative, political, technical, and regulatory concerns, and how those concerns affect what we see on the screen (big or little). In the winter 2024 quarter at Northwestern she will teach a doctoral elective seminar entitled “Media and American Politics.”
Her most recent book, When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America, received an award from the Pattis Family Foundation/Newberry Library, was praised in the New York Review of Books, and in February 2023 was chosen as a “Best Book” by the New Yorker. Earlier books include Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line (2016) and What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest (2011). She began her career with a research focus on children’s television and conservative evangelical media.
Although most of her publications center on broadcast media, Hendershot is also an expert on Hollywood cinema of the 1950s–70s and has published on films ranging from Dog Day Afternoon to the Creature from the Black Lagoon trilogy. Her essay on the films of Roger Corman is forthcoming, and she is currently working on a short monograph on Nashville.
Prof. Hendershot has held fellowships at Princeton University, the Nieman Foundation and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (both at Harvard), New York University, Stanford University, and Vassar College. She has also been a Guggenheim fellow, and for five years she was editor of Cinema Journal (now JCMS), the official publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
