Bio

Bridget Kies is Associate Professor of Film Studies and Production at Oakland University, where she also currently serves as Assistant Director of Women and Gender Studies. Immediately prior, she served as the faculty fellow for AI and teaching at Oakland’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for three semesters. She received her PhD in Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Media from Columbia College Chicago.

Bridget’s research is at the intersections of media studies, cultural history, and gender/sexuality studies. Her peer-reviewed essays have appeared in numerous academic journals and edited collections. Her book, Murder, She Wrote (Wayne State University Press, 2025), is the first book-length study of the iconic 1980s television series. With Megan Connor, she is co-editor of Fandom, the Next Generation (University of Iowa Press, 2022), the first academic study of transgenerational fandoms of media texts. Her book Conservatively Queer TV: Mainstream Masculinities and the Reagan Era is currently in production at Syracuse University Press.

For the last three years, Bridget has been actively researching generative (and now agentic) AI’s impacts on higher education and the creative industries. She routinely gives workshops to creative writers and is currently conducting a major study into how AI is changing the romance industry. In addition to giving workshops on AI and pedagogy, she is the co-author, with Mel Stanfill, of Teaching AI in Film and Media Studies (Routledge, 2025).

An in-demand speaker, Bridget is a firm believer in the humanities and actively works to make humanities research accessible and exciting for the general public. At Oakland, she serves on the executive board of the Center for Public Humanities. She is always interested in speaking to community groups about television history, LGBTQ media and literature, media fandom, and AI.