Introduction
Sophia A. McClennen is professor of international affairs and comparative literature at Penn State University and founding director of the Center for Global Studies. She has published twelve books including Pranksters vs. Autocrats with Srdja Popovic (Cornell 2020), Globalization and Latin American Cinema Palgrave 2018) and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights (Routledge 2015). In addition to her books she has edited eight special issues of journals and published over 70 scholarly essays on a range of topics all of which coalesce around the question of how culture, politics, and society intersect.
Expert
Dr. McClennen is professor of international affairs and comparative literature and the founding director of Penn State's Center for Global Studies, a Title VI FLAS Center, and has ties to the departments of Spanish and Women's Studies. She has published twelve books and has two in process. Her most recent monograph is Pranksters vs. Autocrats: Why Dilemma Actions Advance Nonviolent Activism (Cornell UP 2020), co-authored with Srdja Popovic. She also recently released Globalization and Latin American Cinema: Toward a New Critical Paradigm (Palgrave 2018) and The Debt Age (Routledge 2018), co-edited with Jeffrey Di Leo and Peter Hitchcock. Other recent books include The Routledge Companion to Human Rights and Literature (2015), co-edited with Alexandra Schultheis Moore, which includes over 50 contributions to the topic. She also recently published, Is Satire Saving our Nation? Mockery and American Politics (Palgrave 2014), co-authored with Penn State communications undergraduate Remy Maisel, and Neoliberalism, Terrorism, Education (Paradigm 2013), which she co-wrote with Jeffrey Di Leo, Henry Giroux, and Kenneth Saltman. Her latest manuscript is entitled The Comedians Aren't Kidding: Why Satire Makes Sense When Politics Doesn’t, which analyzes the role that political satire has played in the Trump era. She is also working on a book in the global impact of political satire: The Revolution Will Be Satirized.
In addition to her books she has edited eight special issues of journals and published over 70 scholarly essays on a range of topics all of which coalesce around the question of how culture, politics, and society intersect. Her work often analyzes the links between political events and their media representations, which has led her to critique the relationship between mainstream culture, politics, bias, and social injustice. She also publishes on cultural responses to social conflict such as those associated with war, imperialism, immigration, dictatorship, patriarchy, and globalization. Other central research areas include work on political satire, social media, and the millennial generation.
She has conducted research on education and international area studies, with particular attention to how multidisciplinary approaches enhance understanding of global issues. She is particularly interested in the way that the media can influence ideas of civic agency and national ideals and she is one of the nation’s leading experts on the connections between satire, democracy, and the public sphere. She regularly lectures on cultural identity, ethics, and cross-cultural communication and she is working on a method for minimizing the role of cultural bias in conflict. She teaches courses in cultures of globalization, cross-cultural conflict resolution, human rights culture, global media, political journalism, the cultures of displaced peoples, cultural trade policy, and theories of globalization.
Fields of expertise: Culture, Reduction of inequalities / equity / poverty eradication, Social change / social transformations