BA, Christopher Newport University
MA, University of South Florida
PHD, Univ of North Carolina Chapel
Megan M. Wood is a feminist cultural studies scholar of American political and popular culture, and an Assistant Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Ohio Northern University.
Trained at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (PhD, 2023; Graduate Certificate in Cultural Studies), in her research Wood critically engages mass and popular cultural forms like reality television, social media, celebrity, genre fiction, and advertising to explore how they organize political attention and feeling, and how popular feelings are made political. Her early research in feminist media and surveillance studies examined some of the ways social media teach women to experience objectifying surveillance as empowerment — work that appears in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies and in the Duke University Press collection Feminist Surveillance Studies. More recent work follows political feeling into the pandemic/Trump era and beyond, with writing on the sexual politics of authoritarian desire, popular fantasies of national disunion, and the figure of the “prepper” in popular culture.
Her first monograph in progress, tentatively titled Encountering Apocalypse: Dispatches from the End of the World As I Know It, explores how apocalypse has become a dominant framework for American cultural feelings and experiences. Rooted in cultural studies and in conversation with the critical turn in the interdisciplinary field of apocalyptic studies, the book develops a theory of apocalyptic citizenship: a civic relation to a state which appears unable or unwilling to secure an adequate — or adequately shared — future, conscripting its subjects into the private, exhausting labor of bracing for the end. Apocalyptic citizenship registers a rupture most acutely for those in whose image an idealized future was built, even as others have been surviving the end of one world or another all along. Encountering Apocalypse interrogates the modal figures of this citizenship as Wood encounters them in public and popular culture — the prepper and the ark-builder, the maternal guardian and the future-bearing child, the messianic visionary and the Cassandra, among others — and explores the question of whether the loss of a world might also be the dis/closure the word “apocalypse” has always been about: an opening onto new ways of living in the present that refuse defensiveness, denial, and despair.
Wood is also currently co-editing the Anthem Handbook of Cultural Studies and a special issue of the Popular Culture Studies Journal on prediction and popular culture. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Cultural Economy, where she was previously Associate Editor, and holds elected governance roles in the Cultural Studies Association and the Association for Cultural Studies. In 2026 she was selected for the National Humanities Center's Scholarly Writing Institute to advance Encountering Apocalypse.
A 2026 recipient of the Bowyer Innovations in Teaching Award, Wood teaches classes across the CAMS curriculum, including Cultural Studies & Media Analysis, Gender & Communication, Communication Theory, Group Communication, and the program's senior capstone course.