Heather Jaber

About

Heather Jaber is an assistant professor in residence with a joint appointment across Communication and Liberal Arts Programs. She received her PhD in communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and holds an MA in media studies from the American University of Beirut. 

Jaber’s research and teaching examines digital and popular culture, affect and emotion, and transnational media. In her research, she examines the affects and emotions that sustain national imaginaries in the MENA region by analyzing the digital performances which work to unsettle or repair them. She is particularly interested in narratives of shame and pride which circulate online and their relationship to an imagined global belonging.

Research

• Examining the role of affects or emotions in popular media
• Analyzing trends in televisual and digital culture in the MENA region
• Exploring the political rhetoric and geopolitical dimension of feeling
• Understanding nationalist expressions across media platforms

Teaching

• Introduction to Digital Culture
• Social Media, Power, and Emotion
• Interpreting Digital Artifacts

Publications/Scholarship

Jaber, H. (forthcoming, 2023). Missionizing affects: Recoding the digital leak in transnational media. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication.

 Lingel, J., & Jaber, H. (2022). Performance, Spectacle, Affect: The Polygraph’s Sexual Politics. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 0(0), 5–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439221129923

Jaber, H. (2021) Tricksters, cyborgs, and the musalsal: media movement and infrastructure gaps in Arab television, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 38:2, 155-168, DOI: 10.1080/15295036.2021.1884276

Jaber, H., & Kraidy, M. M. (2020). Mediating Islamic State| The geopolitics of television drama and the “Global War on Terror”: Gharabeeb Soud against Islamic State. International Journal of Communication, 14, 20.

Jaber, H. (2020). Containers, modular systems, and intellectual affects. Material Secularisms.https://web.sas.upenn.edu/material-secularisms/2020/04/25/heather-jaber-containers-modular-systems-and-intellectual-affects-2/ 

Jaber, H. (2016). Crossing the Border: Rethinking failure and exile in Lebanese musalsalat. Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, 2(1).