(Photo Credit: Michael I. Niman)
Shannon O’Sullivan is a writer, researcher, and educator with a decade-long career in higher education.
O’Sullivan’s research investigates the relationships between media, political rhetoric, and social inequities with a focus on televised representations of race, class, gender, and their intersections. More broadly, she is interested in portrayals of working-class life and U.S. political reporting on class and unions.
Other areas of inquiry include social media discourses about grief; Irish-American culture and identity; and U.S. militarism and the NFL.
She earned her PhD in Media Studies from the University of Colorado at Boulder with graduate certificates in Comparative Ethnic Studies and Women and Gender Studies in 2017.
O’Sullivan authored the 2022 book, Reality TV’s Real Men of the Recession: White Masculinity in Crisis and the Rise of Trumpism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books), which was reviewed in the Journal of Working-Class Studies in 2023.
She contributed the chapter, “Bipolar and Shameless: Showtime’s Portrayal of Living and Working with Bipolar Disorder” in Normalizing Mental Illness and Neurodiversity in Entertainment Media: Quieting the Madness, eds. Malynnda Johnson and Christopher John Olson, Routledge (2021).
Additionally, she published articles in the Journals of American Culture and Popular Culture, as well as review essays with the Journal of Popular Communication and Lateral.
Her article, “Playing ‘Redneck’: White Masculinity and Working-Class Performance on Duck Dynasty,” was reprinted in the sixth edition of Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader.
Her commentary has also been featured in YES! Magazine and Inside Higher Ed.
As a trained journalist, O’Sullivan wrote more than thirty stories with Buffalo Business First, including a profile of the late mathematician and Nobel laureate, Herbert Hauptman.
Born and raised in Buffalo, NY, she remains devoted to the Buffalo Bills and the city that formed her.
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Shannon O'Sullivan 