Position Title
Assistant Professor
Position Title
Assistant Professor
- Cinema and Digital Media
she/her
Bio
Katlin Marisol Sweeney-Romero (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media at UC Davis. She received her PhD in English with a specialization in Film Studies from The Ohio State University in 2023. Her dissertation, “Social Mediated Latinas: Creating and Contouring Digital Latina Looks in the Twenty-First Century,” examines how Latinas utilize their social media presence to act as both cultural producers of original content and participants in intracultural discourse related to ethnoracial identity. She is presently at work developing her dissertation into her first book project.
Katlin’s research on Latinx new media and U.S. popular culture appears in a number of edited collections. Her chapter in TikTok Cultures in the United States (Routledge, 2022) tracks the onset of the “that girl” trend in the wellness subculture on TikTok in 2021 and its connections to the beauty/lifestyle subcultures on YouTube in the 2010s. Her chapter in Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century (U of Arizona P, 2022) argues that in Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, Black and Latina characters function as suffering support system figures to the white protagonist; plot twists in multi-episode and season story arcs push their hopes for a sustainable future to the narrative periphery. Her chapter in Cultural Studies in the Digital Age (Hyperbole Books, 2021) considers how IDW Publishing and DC Entertainment’s Love is Love comics anthology “for a cause” showcases the comics medium’s capabilities to create space visually and verbally for queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) to process a mass tragedy like the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016.Her chapter in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies (Routledge, 2020) proposes that the protagonist of Image Comics series Bitch Planet can be read as a Black feminist superhero whose superpower is reclaiming anger from the confines of the “angry black woman” stereotype in the U.S. imaginary.
Recently, Katlin also published a chapter in The Meanings of Dress (5th edition) that examines Latina beauty gurus’ cultural production on YouTube, as well as an article in Label Me Latino/a that surveys the work of comics creator Amber Padilla. Forthcoming work includes an article in Girlhood Studies on comics creator Daisy Ruiz (“Draizys”), a chapter on queer Latinas’ mental health in the Image Comics series Blackbird, and a chapter on Latina characters’ self-adornment practices in the Netflix series Gentefied.
Katlin presently serves as the Co-Coordinator of Programming and Marketing for The Latinx Comic Arts Festival at Modesto Junior College, the Social Strategist for the Comics Studies Society, and on the editorial board of Amatl Comix at San Diego State University Press.