Heather Hendershot

Heather Hendershot is an American historian. A 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, she has written several books on television studies – Saturday Morning Censors, Shaking the World for Jesus (2004), What's Fair on the Air? (2011), Open to Debate (2016), and When the News Broke (2022) – and edited one volume: Nickelodeon Nation (2004). She is Cardiss Collins Professor of Communication Studies and Journalism at the Northwestern University School of Communication, and she has previously served as the editor of Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

Biography Hendershot grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, to a Quaker family. Hendershot has described her upbringing as shaping her views on gender.

Hendershot attended Yale University, where she obtained her BA in French and Film Studies, She later did her graduate studies at the University of Rochester, where she obtained an MA and PhD, both in English and part of the film program. In 1998, she published her first book, Saturday Morning Censors, based on her doctoral thesis. Following her time at Queens College, she became a professor of film and media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She later moved to the Northwestern University School of Communication, where she held a full professorship.

Hendershot specializes in television studies, as well as mid-20th-century Hollywood cinema. and a monograph about evangelical Christianity product marketing called Shaking the World for Jesus. In 2009, Hendershot was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She later published two more monographs: What’s Fair on the Air? (2011), centered on the era of Cold War right-wing broadcasters Billy James Hargis, H. L. Hunt, Carl McIntire, and Dan Smoot; and Open to Debate (2016), centered on the conservative talk show Firing Line. She served as the editor of Journal of Cinema and Media Studies for five years. it was shortlisted for the Newberry Library's 2023 Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award.