Madeline Ullrich

Dr. Madeline Ullrich

Dr. Madeline (Maddie) Ullrich (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Ullrich’s research areas include feminist media studies, television studies, feminist film theory, queer theory, and narrative theory.

At OU, Maddie teaches introductory courses (“Intro to WGS,” Fall 2024) and courses that explore popular culture and media through the lens of gender and sexuality (“LGBTV,” Spring 2025.) Maddie has also taught courses in television and film theory, including “Television and Gender,” “Queer Cinema,” “Film History 1989-Present”, and “Television History.” Additionally, Ullrich has developed and taught courses such as “Feminist Theory and Rhetoric” and “Understanding Film” for the Rochester Education Justice Initiative, a prison education program that provides accredited college courses in Western New York State prisons.

Ullrich’s first book manuscript Feeling Feminism on Television examines the resurgence of feminism on contemporary narrative TV, specifically how feminist TV in the present primarily addresses viewers through ambivalent or negative feelings. Situating this shift within television’s larger “affective turn,” Ullrich explores how the dominant representational mode within mainstream feminism—historically that of role models and positive images—is largely replaced with a mode of address that asks viewers to identify with negative and even antagonistic feelings.  Rather than seeing television’s affective turn as the apotheosis of feminist storytelling, Ullrich explores the potential consequences of this move for both the television industry and for feminist politics, a shift that is perhaps indicative of an “identity crisis” for both television as a medium and feminism more broadly.

Selected Publications

“The Impossibility of Children’s Television,” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 26, 2024.

“The Feminist Refusal of I May Destroy You,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Volume 39, Number 1 (115), May 2024

 “Reboot, squared” and “The Reboot Will Be Televised,” Public Books cluster issue, co-edited with Sarah Kessler, September 2023 https://www.publicbooks.org/reboot-squared/   

“Self-Narrative TV in Uncertain Times.” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 17, 2022.  

 “Finding Our Stories in Elana Levine’s Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US  Television History,” View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture, Issue 27: The Formatting of Late Television.

 “Quality is Just Another Word,” Post45: Contemporaries, in “The 7 Neoliberal Arts,” August 31, 2020.

 “Nausea, Disorientation, Failure: Queer Form in Chantal Akerman’s Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna,” ASAP/Journal, Volume 5, No. 2