Faculty and Staff

Mel Stanfill

• Associate Professor
• Email: mel.stanfill@ucf.edu
• Campus Location: TCH236D
• View CV
• View personal website

Biography

Mel Stanfill is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Texts and Technology Program and the Department of English at the University of Central Florida. Stanfill holds a PhD in Communications and Media from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Stanfill’s research is situated in cultural studies, examining media fans, social media, and the law through lenses of labor, consumption, heteronormativity, and whiteness, and has appeared in venues such as New Media and Society, Cultural Studies, and Transformative Works and Cultures.

Research Interests

Fan Studies; Queer Theory; Race and Gender Studies; Cultural Studies of Law; Media Studies

Selected Publications

Books

• Stanfill, Mel. 2024. Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture. NYU Press.
• Stanfill, Mel. Rock This Way: Cultural Constructions of Musical Legitimacy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023.
• Salter, Anastasia, and Mel Stanfill. 2020. A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.   
• Stanfill, Mel. 2019. Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.  

Articles/Essays

• Kies, Bridget, and Mel Stanfill. 2024. “From Algorithms to Attribution: Teaching AI and Copyright in Media Studies.” Teaching Media 9 (2). https://doi.org/10.3998/jcms.18261332.0063.802.
• Stanfill, Mel, and Jillian Klean Zwilling. 2023. “Critical Considerations for Safe Space in the College Classroom.” College Teaching 71(2): 85–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2023.2179011.
• Condis, Megan, and Mel Stanfill. 2022. “Debating with Wertham’s Ghost: Comic Books, Culture Wars, and Populist Moral Panics.” Cultural Studies 36 (6): 953–80. .
• Tarvin, Emily,* and Mel Stanfill. 2022. “‘YouTube’s Predator Problem’: Platform Moderation as Governance-Washing, and User Resistance.” Convergence 28 (3): 822–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565211066490.
• Stanfill, Mel. 2021. “Can’t Nobody Tell Me Nothin’: ‘Old Town Road’, Resisting Musical Norms, and Queer Remix Reproduction.” Popular Music 40 (3–4), 347–63. https://doi.org/10.1017/S026114302100057X.
  
• Lothian, Alexis, and Mel Stanfill. 2021. “An Archive of Whose Own? White Feminism and Racial Justice in Fan Fiction’s Digital Infrastructure.” Transformative Works and Cultures 36, n.p. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2021.2119.
• Winter, Rachel,* Anastasia Salter, and Mel Stanfill. 2021. “Communities of Making: Exploring Parallels between Fandom and Open Source.” First Monday 26 (2). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10870.
• Newton, Olivia B.,* and Mel Stanfill. 2020. “My NSFW Video Has Partial Occlusion: Deepfakes and the Technological Production of Non-Consensual Pornography.” Porn Studies 7 (4): 398–414. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2019.1675091. 
• Stanfill, Mel. 2020. “Introduction: The Reactionary in the Fan and the Fan in the Reactionary.” Television & New Media 21 (2): 123–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419879912. 
• Kretzschmar, Mark, and Mel Stanfill. 2019. “Mods as Lightning Rods: A Typology of Video Game Mods, Intellectual Property, and Social Benefit/Harm.” Social & Legal Studies 28 (4): 517–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/0964663918787221.  
• Stanfill, Mel. 2019. “Fans of Color in Femslash.” Transformative Works and Cultures 29. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2019.1528.
• Navar-Gill, Annemarie and Mel Stanfill. 2018. “We shouldn't have to trend to make you listen”: Queer fan hashtag campaigns as production interventions.” Journal of Film and Video. 70 (3-4).
• Stanfill, Mel. 2017. “Where the Femslashers Are: Media on the Lesbian Continuum.” Transformative Works and Cultures 24. http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/959.
• Mel Stanfill and Angharad N. Valdivia. 2017. “(Dis)locating Nations in the World Cup: Football Fandom and the Global Geopolitics of Affect.” Social Identities. (23) 1: 104-119. doi:10.1080/13504630.2016.1157466.

Book Sections/Chapters

• Antoine, Anshare and Mel Stanfill. 2024. “‘I really need Miss Rona to start tap dancing around in them lungs’: Black Twitter’s Political Humor in COVID-19 Times.” Rolling: Blackness and Mediated Comedy, edited by Alfred L. Martin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Salter, Anastasia, and Mel Stanfill. 2023. “Game Studies, Endgame?” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, 261–72. Univ Of Minnesota Press.
  
• Stanfill, Mel and Anastasia Salter. 2022. “Avatar Bodies That Matter: The Work of 'Realism' in Gendered Representation.” EA Sports FIFA: Feeling the Game, edited by Raiford Guins, Henry Lowood, and Carlin Wing. New York:  Bloomsbury Press.
• Stanfill, Mel. 2020. “Straight (White) Women Writing about Men Bonking? Complicating our Understanding of Gender and Sexuality in Fandom.” The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Communication, edited by Marnel Niles Goins, Joan Faber McAlister, and Bryant Keith Alexander, 446-458. New York: Routledge.
• Mel Stanfill, Chris Gurrie, Jenny Korn, Jason M. Martin, and Khadijah White. 2018. “Climate on Campus: Intersectional Interventions in Contemporary Struggles.” Interventions: International Communication Association 2017 Theme Book New York: Peter Lang, p. 229-243
• Stanfill, Mel. 2018. “The Unbearable Whiteness of Fandom and Fan Studies” in Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Fandom, ed Paul Booth. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. 
• Stanfill, Mel. 2017. “The Fan Fiction Gold Rush, Generational Turnover, and the Battle for Fandom’s Soul”in Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, ed Melissa Click and Suzanne Scott. New York: Routledge.  
• Stanfill, Mel. 2016. “Straighten up and Fly White: Whiteness, Heteronormativity, and the Representation of Happy Endings for Fans.” In Seeing Fans: Representations of Fandom in Media and Popular Culture, edited by Lucy Bennett and Paul Booth. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Courses

• Spring 2026
• Fall 2025
• Summer 2025
• Spring 2025
• Fall 2024
• Summer 2024