Biography

Ph.D. Film & Media Studies, University of California, Berkeley

M.A. Film & Media Studies, University of California, Berkeley

M.A. Moving Image Archiving and Preservation, New York University

B.A. Anthropology, minor in English, University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Blaylock is a television and media historian with research interests in African studies, audio-visual archives, and postcolonial and decolonial theory. Most of her research focuses on Ghanaian media histories. Dr. Blaylock is currently working on a book manuscript entitled The Promise of New Media, or the Racial Contours of Medium Specificity in Africa. In it, she theorizes the history of new media by examining representations of different media technologies—gramophones, radio, cinema, television, and mobile phones—in Africa to highlight the ways racial difference has been central to conceptions of media across colonial and postcolonial contexts.

While researching the origins of Ghanaian television for her book, Dr. Blaylock was struck by the indirect but sustained involvement of UNESCO in Ghana’s broadcast history. While never taking as prominent of a role in the developments of Ghana’s television service as the Marconi telecommunications company or the Canadian and British Broadcasting Corporations, UNESCO nevertheless offered expertise and opportunities for networking and publishing. This led to her interest in studying UNESCO’s role in bringing together African broadcasters from across the continent for collaborative exchanges on the positive contributions of television for the development of Africa and the economic and technical struggles facing African broadcasters, strengthened pan-African networks in the immediate post-independence era.

The transnational role that UNESCO played in supporting global television development informs Dr. Blaylock’s approach to teaching graduate student courses like “The Global Television Industry.” She also brings her experience as a media historian and her training as a moving image archivist into undergraduate and graduate television history courses at Rowan.

Courses

The Global Television Industry; Television in the Archive; Research Methods in Television Studies; TV History and Appreciation

Research Interests

African media studies; audio-visual archival studies; feminist media studies; global television; postcolonial and decolonial theory

Publications

Blaylock, Jennifer. “Audiovisual artifacts: the African politics of image loss.” Social Dynamics 50, no. 1 (2024): 60–75.

Blaylock, Jennifer. “New Media, Neo-Media: The Brief Life of Socialist Television in Ghana” boundary 2 49, no. 1 (2022): 195–230.

Blaylock, Jennifer. “The Mother, the Mistress, and the Cover Girls: Ghana Broadcasting Corporation and the Coloniality of Gender” Feminist Media Histories 8, no. 1 (2022): 102–133.

Blaylock, Jennifer. “‘Who wants a BlackBerry these days?’: Serialized New Media and its Trash” Screen 62, no. 2 (2021): 1–17.

Blaylock, Jennifer. “The Persistent Instructor: Forty-five years of Kofi the Good Farmer in Ghana” Journal of African Cinemas 12, no. 1 (2020): 71–86.