Dr. Melissa R. Meade is as an assistant professor of Communication Technologies at Seton Hall University. Her research encompasses digital media; transmedia storytelling; technology and culture; social memory; deindustrialization; identity; labor, work and cultural production; and environmental communication. Her work appears in prominent publications including Cultural Studies, Discourse & Communication, and Media, War, and Conflict as well as scholarly volumes.
Among her achievements include the National Communication Association’s Donald P. Cushman Memorial Award, the Constance Coiner Award in Working-Class Studies, and numerous top paper awards. She has received support from various organizations, including fellowships from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, the Waterhouse Family Institute for Communication and Society at Villanova University, and the National Communication Association. She was a University Fellow at Temple University.
Before entering academia, Dr. Meade worked in applied communication fields, specializing in language, public communication, and intercultural communication. She is f luent in Spanish and has held positions at several institutions, including Allegheny College, Villanova University, and Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey in Mexico.
Project statement:
1 Book: In the Shadow of “King Coal”: Memory, New Media, Identity, and Culture in the Post-Industrial Pennsylvania Anthracite Region
2 Digital Archival Project: The Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania Digital Project
I am working on two projects: One is a book project and the other is digital media project: My book project, In the Shadow of “King Coal”: Memory, New Media, Identity, and Culture in the Post-Industrial Pennsylvania Anthracite Region, focuses on how inhabitants of a deindustrialized area experience and communicate about systems of resource extraction, labor displacement, and environmental inequality. I examine these aspects through three interrelated practices: digital storytelling, the study of media discourses, and digital and ethnographic and autoethnographic research approaches. I grew up in the Anthracite Coal Region, I am the granddaughter of miners, and the daughter of a company town resident. My research includes the collaboration with local participants vis-à-vis a multi-modal public digital humanities collaboratory that I created and continue to maintain called “the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania Digital Project”, and to which community members contributed through digital forums about their lived and cultural experiences.
The Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania Digital Project is an interactive documentary, interpretive, and archival project representing the extensive social effects and cultural transformations of this Appalachian Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania, which contains the only reserves of United States! anthracite coal, through nineteenth-century industrialization, the decline of the coal industry in the middle of the twentieth-century, and the upheavals of deindustrialization that followed. The project highlights how this region’s labor force and human cost were instrumental to U.S. industrialization, while examining how global conditions such as political unrest and poverty shaped the Coal Region’s social and physical landscape.
The project aims to create a comprehensive digital archive for the Greater Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania’s cultural heritage. This platform will preserve personal narratives, media, essays, and community contributions while implementing enhanced search functionality and interactive features. By consolidating fragmented digital content with reliable metadata and improved accessibility and searchability, the platform will serve as a central hub for community dialogue, cultural memory, media representations about this historically marginalized region.
