Michael Coventry is an historian who works at the intersection of gender studies, popular culture, media studies and digital pedagogy. His research asks the question: how do people construct identities and build knowledge in media environments? He studies this question across two primary cases: media made by and for soldiers and digital media made by students.
He trained as an historian of the 20th century United States, with a focus on histories of gender, nationalism, and popular culture. Using a wide range of rarely-considered sources—especially cartoons, jokes and songs by soldiers—his book project, The First Media War: Doughboys and the Making of Culture, considers the construction of competing soldier identities across several key media practices such as propaganda, soldier welfare, letter-writing, cartooning, and training camp/battlefield newspapering. Using historical methods informed by a media studies framework, the book argues that military and civilian leaders used media to create idealistic visions of soldiering while, unexpectedly, soldiers sometimes used media to counter those visions with a more ‘realistic’ view.
In CCT, Prof. Coventry teaches the introductory course (see this
video for an introduction), as well as courses in gender and popular culture, war/media/technology, gender studies research methods, and visual culture research methods. Prof. Coventry is also a Research Fellow in the
Learning Design Lab of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship. For five years, Prof. Coventry was an Assistant Director of the
Visible Knowledge Project, a national, $3 million, grant-funded scholarship of teaching and learning project on new media and the humanities. Based on this experience, his classes often involve "experiments" with new media technologies. Connected to this work, he is completing a multi-campus research project on student and faculty use of
'digital storytelling' in the classroom. Also out of this work, Prof. Coventry is a co-author of the essay "Way of Seeing: Evidence and Learning in the History Classroom," originally published in the Journal of American History and recently re-published in the Bedford/St. Martin's Book, Teaching American History.
Prof. Coventry did a minor field in Latin American history (focused on Mexico and Argentina). During his undergraduate studies, he lived in, and conducted a healthcare survey of, the city of Choluteca, Honduras, for the development group the
Parish and Association of San Jose Obrero (Saint Joseph the Worker) .
Visit the
Digital Storytelling Multimedia Archive. The Digital Storytelling Multimedia Archive represents findings from a multi-campus study of digital storytelling in American Studies, Latino/a studies, history, and ESL classrooms. It was funded by the Visible Knowledge Project and the Center for New Designs in Learning & Scholarship.
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