Biography

Ph.D. Film & Media Studies, University of California, Berkeley

M.A. Film & Media Studies, University of California, Berkeley

M.A. Moving Image Archiving and Preservation, New York University

B.A. Anthropology, minor in English, University of California, Berkeley

Jennifer Blaylock is an assistant professor in the Department of Radio, Television and Film at Rowan University. She is a historian of Pan-African media history with particular interests in media archaeology, feminist media histories, global media studies, non-fiction film and media, audio-visual archives, and decolonial and postcolonial theory.

Blaylock is an award-winning media scholar with an established publication record in African film and media studies. Her 2021 Screen article, “‘Who wants a BlackBerry these days?’: Serialized New Media and its Trash,” won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Katherine Singer Kovács award for best essay published in an academic journal and her 2022 Feminist Media Histories article, “The Mother, the Mistress, and the Cover Girls: Ghana Broadcasting Corporation and the Coloniality of Gender,” won the SCMS Media Industries Special Interest Group (SIG) best essay award.

She is currently working on a history of mid-twentieth century Pan-African media theory entitled Of Masks and Drums: Pan-African Media Histories in an Era of Decolonization. Her book tells the story of African and African-diasporic media artists who worked across mediums and borders to build media industries in newly independent African states that would resist the persistent legacy of colonial inflected media and advance the development of a liberated Africa. Each chapter in Of Masks and Drums focuses on a different media technology to show how discourse about a medium’s specificity in Africa was often used to consolidate political power and sell media technology as a commodity of progress, first by colonialists through racialized performances of gramophones and film and later by African governments with nationalized radio and television industries. At the same time, the book maps Pan-African networks that brought African and African American media practitioners and artists who worked across media into contact as they worked towards differing theories of African media and liberated African futures. At its core, Of Masks and Drums asks how established ontologies of media might shift when histories of media are provincialized. By focusing on African artists and the historical contexts from which they spoke across media, Of Masks and Drums reorients media scholarship away from the machine to show how media theory, and its preoccupations with medium specificity, are entangled with colonial legacies of racial capitalism.

As a scholar of African media histories and graduate of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program at New York University, Blaylock is a passionate advocate for libraries and archives. She is a member of the King’s College London based “Unhousing Restitution: African audiovisual heritage between displacement and return” (UNREST) transnational project funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, and since 2023 she has served on the SCMS Media Archives Committee to help facilitate collaboration between scholars and archival institutions globally. Her teaching regularly incorporates experiential learning opportunities for students in audiovisual archives.

Blaylock supports women’s and gender studies by serving on the Rowan University Women’s and Gender Studies council and on the editorial advisory board for the University of Exeter Press book series in Women’s Broadcasting Histories. She is also a co-facilitator of the Rowan Feminist Reading Group.

She is a dedicated teacher and mentor who supports communities of pedagogical practice locally at Rowan through her membership in the Rowan Teaching Connection and within the larger field of film and media studies as co-chair of the SCMS Critical Media Pedagogies SIG. She values working with graduate students in the Diana King Master of Arts in Film, Television, and Media Studies by supporting their individual intellectual interests and career aspirations.

Courses

The Global Television Industry; Television in the Archive; Research Methods in Television Studies; TV History and Appreciation; Media, Identity, and Representation; Shondaland

Research Interests

African media studies; audio-visual archival studies; feminist media studies; global media studies; postcolonial and decolonial theory

Select Publications

Blaylock, Jennifer. “‘The Bard Wouldn’t Recognize Hamlet’: On Medium Specificity and Shakespeare in Africa” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 47, no. 1 (2025): 135–164.

Blaylock, Jennifer. “Audiovisual artifacts: the African politics of image loss.” Social Dynamics 50, no. 1 (2024): 60–75.

Blaylock, Jennifer. “New Media, Neo-Media: The Brief Life of Socialist Television in Ghana” boundary 2 49, no. 1 (2022): 195–230.

Blaylock, Jennifer. “The Mother, the Mistress, and the Cover Girls: Ghana Broadcasting Corporation and the Coloniality of Gender” Feminist Media Histories 8, no. 1 (2022): 102–133.

Blaylock, Jennifer. “‘Who wants a BlackBerry these days?’: Serialized New Media and its Trash” Screen 62, no. 2 (2021): 1–17.

Blaylock, Jennifer. “The Persistent Instructor: Forty-five years of Kofi the Good Farmer in Ghana” Journal of African Cinemas 12, no. 1 (2020): 71–86.