Blake Beaver

Blake Karsten Beaver is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the Writing and Communication Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Beaver received his Ph.D. from the Literature program at Duke University in 2024. Broadly speaking, Dr. Beaver’s research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century American television, film, and literature, as well as the intermedial relationships between them. In his scholarship, Dr. Beaver studies how these media stage broader cultural perceptions of and social attitudes toward technology, the family, advertising, and aesthetics. In his current book project, Residues of the Televisual Family: Dramas of Digital Dominance, Dr. Beaver examines how contemporary family dramas on U.S. television reflexively represent media technologies, depicting the effects of television’s decline and digital media’s ascendence on the American family. Aligned with Dr. Beaver’s research, his writing and communication courses focus on themes such as the fictional representation of advertising and dysfunctional families in contemporary television. His courses use these themes as case studies through which students can learn about and practice academic, creative, and professional communication genres.