Deborah L. Jaramillo

Deborah Jaramillo is a professor of Film and Television Studies, and Director of Graduate Studies for the American Studies Program. Her current book project investigates the construction of death in non-fiction radio, podcasting, and television.

Dr. Jaramillo’s research interests include television history, death studies, and media censorship. Her first book, Ugly War, Pretty Package: How CNN and Fox News Made the Invasion of Iraq High Concept (Indiana University Press, 2009), explores how the 2003 invasion of Iraq was packaged by cable news. Her second book, The Television Code: Regulating the Screen to Safeguard the Industry (University of Texas Press, 2018) analyzes the U.S. television industry’s attempts to censor its programs and regulate its business practices in the early 1950s.

Her work appears in several edited volumes, including Television: The Critical View, 7th edition; A Companion to Television, 2nd edition; Television History, The Peabody Archive, and Cultural Memory; and From Networks to Netflix: A Guide to Changing Channels. She has also published articles in Popular Communication, Television and New Media, Communication, Culture, and Critique, Critical Studies in Television, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Journal of Radio & Audio Media.

Her most recent publications include "Bury Him by Radio: Early Funeral Broadcasts and the Mourning of President Warren G. Harding" in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture and "The Killers Speak: The Sound of Violence in David Fincher’s Zodiac and Mindhunter (2017-2019)" in Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)interpretation.

A two-time Ford Fellow, she is an associate editor of Television and New Media, a research associate for the National Recording Preservation Board’s Radio Preservation Task Force, and a board member of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image.

Professor Jaramillo teaches the following courses in the Film and Television Studies program: Television Studies, Death and TV, True Crime, Broadcasting Horror, Uncensored TV, and TV Comedy.