Bio

Laura Cook Kenna is a writer and editor as well as an independent scholar of American Culture.

Cook Kenna’s work has appeared in print in USAToday and The Washington Times. Drawing on her past life teaching about film and television, she regularly contributed to both the “Women” and “Entertainment” sections at Christianity Today online. She’s also written pop culture commentary for the online venues Rare and Patheos. She honed her writer’s voice as a blogger about television and film at the now neglected remotepossibilitlesblog.com.

Laura Cook Kenna has also published a range of scholarly journal articles and book chapters drawn from or inspired by her dissertation on how public debates about gangster films, rap, TV and video games organized Americans’ ideas about censorship, Italian American ethnicity, and what counts as “artistic” pop culture for nearly a half a century. She is most proud of her chapter “Making Exploitation Black,” which takes on how Blaxploitation debates fused ideas about taste and race (featured in the book Beyond Blaxploitation (Wayne State Press.)

Cook Kenna most recently taught as faculty for Writing and Cultural Criticism at the Trinity Forum Academy fellowship program in Royal Oak, Maryland and has been a regular guest lecturer on “Trends in Americana” as part of the Public Diplomacy track at the US Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute.

Laura holds a PhD in American Studies from George Washington University.  She also taught at GWU. Appointed as Visiting Assistant Professor, Dr. Cook Kenna developed seven of her own courses covering the history of 20th century American culture, film and television, cultural theory, and research writing.

Laura Cook Kenna lives in Arlington, VA with her chatty daughter, and two big-eyed sons. If she finds any downtime, she spends it on sci-fi, baking, hot yoga (to undo the effects of the baking) or playing the drums.

You can email her here.