Over the last several years, Day of the Badger gift funds have been used to deepen research support for existing faculty. This year, Communication Arts is excited to announce that a portion of gift funds have allowed us to grow our research capacity by recruiting a new communication expert, Professor Diana Leon-Boys, who will be joining the department as an Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies this upcoming fall. Maintaining our capacity for innovation in communication research ensures students learn how to research from the best communication scholars in the world, and Professor Leon-Boys will be a transformative addition to the department.
Leon-Boys focuses her research on media, social inequalities, and representations of marginalized groups, particularly in relation to Latinx populations, women, and children. Her work centers on how these communities are visualized in mainstream pop culture, and how they, at times, push back and enact agency to understand who they are and how they fit in this American culture.
Much of Professor Leon-Boys’s research has revolved around Latinidad and Latinx identity and girlhood within Disney. For one of her current research projects, Leon-Boys will be expanding some of the findings from her book by conducting additional fieldwork at Disney’s Magic Kingdom Park in Florida to analyze how audiences interact with the park characters’ body language and scripting. She will be tracing the various instances where the characters articulate femininity in specific ways, in comparison to their onscreen performances. Here, she will gather many recordings, images, and notes from conversations with the park characters. Leon-Boys envisions this work as a potential way to involve Communication Arts students in the research.
“I would love to engage in this research process of making sense of the data with the help of a student who perhaps does work on girlhood or Disney or gender more broadly in media scapes,” Leon-Boys said. “I think it’ll give them a nice experience making sense of what happens in these incredibly dynamic theme park spaces and share my knowledge about how I’ve worked through the data in previous iterations of projects like this.”
Professor Leon-Boys will bring her research expertise involving Disney and cultural identities in media to two courses this fall, Communication Arts 323: The Business and Culture of Disney and Communication Arts 347: Race, Ethnicity, and Media. We are thrilled to have her background and knowledge shape these courses for current and future students in the department.
“She’s been a leader in girls and youth studies’, Latinx media studies, and more broadly in considering how television and popular culture work,” said Jonathan Gray, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies. “Her expertise contributes to and informs so many discussions that I’m confident she’ll have something to offer many, many students regardless of their own particular interests and goals.”
Successfully recruiting new faculty members requires resources to support their research programs, which can include equipment, fieldwork travel, student support, and more. Providing these resources is doubly important when recruiting an established researcher like Professor Leon-Boys.
“A portion of funds raised during Day of the Badger in 2024 have made it possible for Communication Arts to provide this essential support for Leon-Boys and simultaneously attracted additional research support from the College of Letters & Science, the Office of the Vice-Chancellor for Research, and the Office of the Provost,” said Derek Johnson, Communication Arts Department Chair. This means even modest annual fund gifts can be leveraged to build huge networks of support.
As we begin celebrating Day of the Badger this year and look forward to welcoming Professor Leon-Boys, it’s clear how essential backing for our teaching and research can be. Your support during Day of the Badger allows us to expand our groundbreaking research capacity and provide foundational research opportunities for students.
Support Communication Arts during Day of the Badger on April 8-9, 2025, and keep an eye out for a more in-depth feature of Professor Leon-Boys when she arrives to UW-Madison this fall!