Dr. Sharon R. Mazzarella received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has been at JMU since 2009, and teaches primarily in the Cultural Communication Concentration/Minor as well as research methods classes. Her scholarship examines how various products of media culture portray young people, particularly girls. She is the author of Girls, Moral Panic, and the News Media: Troublesome Bodies (Routledge, 2020) and is editor or co-editor of nine academic collections including The Routledge Companion to Girls’ Studies (Routledge, 2024). She is the recipient of the 2019 Provost Award for Excellence in Research and Scholarship, and her published articles appear in numerous journals including Women’s Studies in Communication, Communication Culture & Critique, the Journal of Children and Media, the Journal of Communication Inquiry, and Girlhood Studies.