This full-color popular culture reader helps students see the world as a text and equips them with the analytical and composing tools to become strong academic writers. This full-color, richly illustrated cultural studies reader directly engages the process of reading and writing about the texts one sees in everyday life. Using the lenses of rhetoric, semiotics and cultural studies, students are encouraged to become effective academic writers while gaining deeper insights into such popular culture categories as movies, technology, race, music, ethnicity, television, media, public space, and more. Just as important, the book teaches students the usefulness of actively reading their surroundings.
Jonathan Silverman is a professor of English at UMass Lowell. He is the editor of Astros and Asterisks: The Houston Sign-Stealing Scandal, Explained.
He is the co-author with Michael Hinds of Johnny Cash International: How and Why the World Loves the Man in Black (University of Iowa Press, 2020), which is the winner of the 2023 Peggy O'Brien Book Prize.
He is also author of Nine Choices: Johnny Cash and American Culture (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010); the co-author with Dean Rader of The World Is a Text: Writing, Reading, and Thinking about Culture and Its Contexts (Pearson/Broadview, 2002-2018, five editions); and the co-editor with Meghan Sweeney of Remaking the American College Campus (McFarland, 2016).
He has served as the Fulbright Roving Scholar in Norway (2007-2008) and was a John H. Daniels fellow at the National Sporting Library (2013-2014). He has published articles on horse racing in The Cambridge Companion to Horseracing, The Journal of Sport History, Poor Yorick, Post, and The End of Austin as part of a larger work on horse racing in progress. He has published work in Prospects, Kugelmass, The Rumpus, The Journal of the American West, and The Journal of Radicalism, and wrote for PBS’s website, Remotely Connected.