About

I’m Rosemary Avance, a scholar of media and communication. I’m from Tulsa, Oklahoma, the land of waving wheat fields, tornado sirens, and evangelical megachurches.

I received a B.A. in Communication from the University of Tulsa and an M.A. and PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. I also received a Certificate in University Teaching and Instruction from Penn’s Center for Teaching and Learning.

I have experience as a university instructor at an Ivy League university, a community college, and a small private liberal arts university. I’ve also spent several years working in industry and consulting positions. My background gives me a breadth of experience ranging from academic expertise in theory-heavy cultural studies to practical industry experience in marketing, strategy, and consumer insights.

Research interests

My work focuses on the intersection of media, identity, and modernity.  Using an interpretive, social constructivist approach, I’m especially interested in the role of the internet in cultivating new religious identities and change within religious institutions. My research explores the ways people use Web 2.0 to advocate for change within their organizations, and how organizations, in turn, adapt their structures and narratives to accommodate these shifting identities.  To date, I’ve focused the majority of my academic attention on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or the Mormons). Beyond Mormonism, I’m interested in broader questions of how new media contributes to shifting discourses in society, such as those around gender and bodies, politics, entertainment and consumer culture, and (dis)ability and difference. All of my work is united by a desire to understand how discourses circulate and shift in a new media environment.

The dissertation

My dissertation, “Constructing Religion in the Digital Age: The Internet and Modern Mormon Identities,” examined the ways modern religious identities are constructed, negotiated, and broadcast via the internet, and how religious institutions respond to these technologically-driven shifts.  In it, I linked the formal features of Internet culture — access, perceived anonymity, and surveillance — to the disruption of Mormon imagined community. I used a combination of ethnographic methods and discourse analysis to track the interplay diverse Mormon narratives, including those of LDS leaders, orthodox members, apologists, heterodox members, and feminists. I show how social advocacy on the Internet contributed to an institutional disavowal of past racist policies, a softening of rhetoric around homosexuality, institutional admission of problematic aspects of church history, and the silencing of one prominent feminist through excommunication which paradoxically allowed for institutional advances toward gender equality.

Publications and awards

I’ve published articles in the Journal of Religion and Society, the Journal of Media and Religion, and the Mormon Studies Review. I’ve contributed a chapter to an edited collection and presented four invited talks and eleven peer-reviewed conference presentations that explore modern Mormon identity and its intersection with communication theory.

I was honored to be the recipient of the 2012-2013 George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Fellowship in Mormon Studies at the University of Utah’s Tanner Humanities Center. Because of this fellowship, I was able to relocate to Salt Lake City, the spiritual capital of Mormonism, to research and write my dissertation.