Kati Lustyik

Katalin (Kati) Lustyik joined Ithaca College in the fall of 2006 and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Television-Radio at the Roy H. Park School of Communications.  She is also a Regional Visiting Fellow at the Institute of European Studies at Cornell University since the summer of 2007.

AREAS OF EXPERTIES:
•    Children, youth and the media
               Transnational children’s television networks (e.g. Nickelodeon)
               Globally circulated children’s programming (e.g. Sesame Street)
               Regulation of children’s media (e.g. junkfood and advergames)
•    Media globalization and television (e.g. global television formats)
•    Global consumer culture
•    Media in Eastern Europe

Prior to coming to Ithaca College, she completed a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship in New Zealand, at the Centre for Communication Research, Auckland University of Technology between January 2004 and December 2005.  During her Postdoctoral Fellowship she researched the uptake in New Zealand of globalized children's television media such as Nickelodeon and Disney. She was also part of an interdisciplinary team formed at AUT that received a research grant to study bro’Town, a groundbreaking prime-time animated production, that represents a unique case study in the broadcasting history of the South Pacific region with international implications.

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS:
•    Book project on children’s media
She is currently finishing a co-authored book project with Dr. Norma Pecora (U. of Ohio), which is a new edition of her influential study of the children’s entertainment business, entitled: The Business of Children’s Entertainment in the 21st Century, that examines the current children’s entertainment industry with focus on the use of digital technology and the globalization of children’s media. It will be part of the Critical Media Studies: Institutions, Politics, and Culture series published by the Roman & Littlefield Publishing Group (Lexington Books).

•    Gender in Children's Television: Exploring Gender and Media across the World
Dr. Lustyik also participated in an international project funded by The International Central Institute for Youth and Educational Television (Germany) in which researchers from 24 countries investigated gender representation on children’s daily television programming. As the Scientific director of the Hungarian project, her team recorded and coded close to 200 hours of children’s programming in 2007. The Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media (USA) sponsored a series of workshops and meetings with children’s television executives to showcase this project in 2008.

TEACHING:
Her primary teaching interests include:
•    Media theory and research
•    Global media studies
•    Television Studies
•    Children’s and youth media
•    The political economy of communication (e.g. global media conglomerations--Disney, Viacom)

Courses currently taught at Ithaca College: Introduction to the Mass Media (freshman level), Global Flow of Information (sophomore level), European Mass Media (junior level), and Global Children and Youth Media (senior seminar). She has also supervised independent study projects (e.g. bro’Town’s international success; US politics and the international versions of Sesame Street).

EDUCATION:
Dr. Lustyik completed her M.A and Ph.D. in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. Her M.A. thesis, “Politics of the V-chip”, was a critical-historical analysis of the political and economical aspects of content regulation in the United States and the role of technology as a panacea for social problems (Advisor: Dr. Janice Peck). Her doctoral dissertation, “The Transformation of Children's Television from Communism to Global Capitalism in Hungary ”, used children's television as a case study to investigate both the changing nature of broadcasting and the changing conceptualization of childhood in Central-eastern Europe (Advisor: Dr. Andrew Calabrese).