Biography

Adrienne Shaw is an Associate Professor in Temple University's Department of Media Studies and Production and a member of the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication graduate faculty. She is an affiliate faculty and a member of the Steering Committee for Temple’s Gender Sexuality and Women Studies program. She was the inaugural director of Temple's Graduate Certificate in Cultural Analytics (2019-2024). She is also a member of the Peabody Awards’ Board of Jurors for Immersive and Interactive Media, a Gayming Magazine Awards Judge, and a member of GLAAD’s Gaming Advisory Council. In 2018, she was also appointed as a Higher Education Video Game Alliance Fellow.

Shaw is the founder of the LGBTQ Game Archive and co-curator of Rainbow Arcade, the world's first exhibit of LGBTQ game history (Dec 2018-May 2019 in Berlin, Germany). She is also author of Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (2014; winner of the 2016 International Communication Association's Popular Communications Division's Book Award). She has co-edited four anthologies: Queer Game Studies (2017), Queer Technologies: Affordances, Affect, Ambivalence (2017), Interventions: Communication Research and Practice (2018), and Planet Digital: A Global Digital Cultures Reader (in press). From 2011 to 2015 she was also part of the multi-million dollar and award-winning CYCLES project, which developed games to train users to identify and mitigate cognitive biases. A full list of her publications is available via Google Scholar.

Shaw was the host and program chair for the 2021 (online) and 2023 (Philadelphia) Association of Internet Researcher’s Annual Conferences. Shaw is also a co-editor of New York University Press's Critical Cultural Communication book series and serves on editorial/review boards for the Journal of Communication; the International Journal of Cultural Studies; Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies; Media, Culture, & Society; Critical Studies in Media Communication; Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture; Game Studies; the Research Center for Communication and Culture, Universidade Católica Portuguesa; and Not Your Mama’s Gamer.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

• Emerging media and technology
• Media, identity and representation
• Popular communication
• The media industry, laws and policies

COURSES TAUGHT

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

RECENT

• Punathambekar, A., Shaw, A., & Gray, J. (In Press). Planet Digital: A global digital cultures reader. NYU Press.
• Shaw, A. (2025). Video games as cultural studies other. International Journal of Cultural Studies 28(2), 343-353. https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779241295771
• Shaw, A. (2025). Is it all just cultural studies? One scholar’s journey into media and game studies. In A. Karabinus, C.A. Kocurek, C. Mejeur, & E. Vossen (Eds.), Historiographies of Game Studies: What it has been, what it could be. (609-630) Punctum Books.
• Gray, K.L., Reinhard, C.D., & Shaw, A. (2025). Conversation on Studying ‘Toxic’ Fans. In M. Click & S. Scott (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, Second Edition (100-110) Routledge.
• Shaw, A., Durkhee, B., & Cook, A. (2024) GLAAD Gaming: The state of LGBTQ Inclusion in Video Games. https://glaad.org/glaad-gaming/2024
• Kukshinov, E. & Shaw, A. (2022). Playing with privilege: Examining demographics in choosing player-characters in video games. Psychology of Popular Media 11(1): 90-101. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000378
• Shaw, A., Scharkow, M., & Wang, Z.J. (2021). Special Issue: Open Communication Research, Journal of Communication 71(5).
• Shaw, A. & Persaud, C.J. (2020). Beyond texts: Using queer readings to document LGBTQ game content. First Monday 25(8): https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i8.10439

Education

Personal Website

https://adrienneshaw.com/

Adrienne Shaw's TUScholarShare

Awards

2021

• Klein College Faculty Service Award
• Temple Faculty Senate Service Award

2016–2017

• Temple Digital Scholarship Center Faculty Fellowship

2016

• Outstanding Book Award for Gaming at the Edge from the Popular Communication Division of the International Communication Association

2014

• Junior Faculty Teaching Award, School of Media and Communication, Temple University