Sophia A. McClennen

Sophia A. McClennen directs Penn State's Center for Global Studies as well as its Latin American Studies program and has ties to the departments of Comparative Literature, Spanish, and Women's Studies. She has published seven books and has three in process. Her latest single-authored volume is Colbert's America: Satire and Democracy (2012), which studies the role of Stephen Colbert in shaping political discourse after 9/11.

In addition to her books she has edited a number of journal special issues and published over 50 essays on a range of topics all of which coalesce around the question of how culture, politics, and society intersect. Her work often analyzes the links between political events and their media representations, which has led her to critique the relationship between mainstream culture, political praxis, stereotypes, and social injustice. She also publishes on cultural responses to social conflict such as those associated with war, imperialism, state formation, immigration and exile, dictatorship, patriarchy, and globalization.
 
In 2006 she was the Fulbright Research Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and she has also held a Fulbright faculty award in Peru. She has taught in Chile, Canada, Germany, and Peru, and has conducted research in those countries as well as in Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Spain, Guatemala, Uruguay, and Costa Rica.

She regularly writes for Huffington Post and has had pieces in Alternet, Truthout, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Counterpunch. She has appeared on Huffington Post Live as well as the Wall Street Journal Live and has done numerous interviews in print and radio.