Coming Full Circle

Lauren Wilks ’13, Ph.D., always enjoyed school, but her communication capstone her senior year at Trinity University was a formative experience that set her on a path to earning her doctorate and returning to her alma mater as a professor in Fall 2023.

“My capstone was a big deal for me. It was my first self-directed sustained study, and I got to do a deep dive into a whole bunch of feminist analysis in order to figure out how I wanted to do my research. It gave me a way of thinking about gender and women’s studies scholarship, which I hadn’t necessarily had much exposure to yet,” Wilks says.

Wilks refined her capstone project, “Is Grey’s Anatomy on the Wave? A Feminist Textual Analysis of Meredith Grey and Cristina Yang," and presented it at the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication’s annual conference in 2014, receiving Best in Category distinction for the Entertainment Studies Interest Group. It was one of 30 projects accepted to DePauw University’s 39th Annual Undergraduate Honors Conference.

Outside of class, Wilks was involved in Alpha Phi Omega, Alpha Chi Lambda, KRTU, TigerTV, and wrote for the Campus Pulse section of the Trinitonian, which Wilks credits with putting a career in education on her radar even though she was not fully aware of it at the time.

“The Trinitonian gave me the chance to talk with people from the Trinity community whom I might not have necessarily engaged with otherwise. Interviews with faculty gave me a more three-dimensional understanding of what the job of being a professor entails, and I got to have open, honest conversations with professors in different departments outside of my majors and learn what they are passionate about,” Wilks says. “I still have fond memories of some of the interviews I did, like with Dr. Richard Reed and his beekeeping.”

After graduating from Trinity, Wilks worked in public relations, giving her a different set of skills to complement the ones she had learned with the Trinitonian.

“Public relations was about communicating on behalf of my clients and making their messaging appeal to journalists and their target audiences,” Wilks says. “You need public relations to be able to pitch effectively on behalf of people.”

Through her experiences in public relations, Wilks became interested in deeper questions around how content disseminates, who manages the spread of information, and how and why different types of content eventually become popular, and she noticed she had begun to miss the type of critical thinking she did her senior year at Trinity.

“I remember coming back to Trinity for Alumni Weekend and speaking with Dr. Christ and Dr. Delwiche, and they encouraged me to consider graduate school. Dr. Henderson was my communication adviser and a true mentor during my undergraduate studies, and we had also been talking about the opportunities that were available to me. I think all of those conversations gave me the push I needed to apply,” Wilks says.

Wilks earned her master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication. She enjoyed researching her thesis, “Teens of Color on TV: Charting Shifts in Sensibility and Approaches to Portrayals of Black Characters in American Serialized Teen Dramas,” so much that she knew she wanted to continue on with her studies. She was accepted into the University of Wisconsin-Madison and planned on completing her doctoral program in Media and Cultural Studies in five years, but an opening in Trinity’s Department of Communication accelerated her timeline.

“Two different friends of mine from academia told me about the job posting, and I could not believe the odds that this opportunity in a department that I have such fond memories of was available,” Wilks says. “I applied to a few places, but Trinity was the winner because of the way that our professors care about their students and really prioritize those relationships.”

Now that she has a full semester under her belt, Wilks truly believes that Trinity students are special.

“Trinity students have this really exciting energy and earnest investment in the work they do,” Wilks says. “It’s really gratifying as a professor to have students who care so deeply, are willing to put in the effort, and have the initiative to take the ball and run with it on their projects.”

Wilks, who has authored articles such as “The Serena Show: Mapping Tensions Between Masculinized and Feminized Media Portrayals of Serena Williams and the Black Female Sporting Body,” is in the process of formalizing a course on race, gender, and sexuality in the media.

“I love to talk about the intersections of identity and media,” Wilks says. “I think that media informs a lot of how we understand ourselves and each other, so I’m excited to see students critically think about how representation and inclusion have evolved in media industries.”

In collaboration with Rebecca Densley, Ph.D., and Sarah Erickson, Ph.D., Wilks is also researching parental mediation in terms of media’s representation of race and ethnicity, investigating what media parents allow their children to engage with based on how it will inform their perceptions of racial or ethnic identity.

Wilks, a San Antonio native, attended a larger out-of-state college after graduating from a small high school, but she missed the close-knit relationships possible with professors in a smaller school setting. She transferred to Trinity her sophomore year as an English major and was grateful for the encouragement and inspiration her Trinity professors gave her.

“Dr. Patrick Keating’s ‘Media Texts’ course is what made me add communication as my second major. He showed me how I could apply the critical lenses that I had been honing in my English classes to pop culture and media,” Wilks says. “Dr. Carey Latimore was also super impactful. I took one of his African American history classes towards the end of my time as a Trinity student, and I would have minored in that if I had gotten to it sooner. His class influenced some of my grad work.”

Wilks is proud to be representing the Department of Communication not only as an alumna but as one of its faculty now.

“It’s cool to look behind the curtain as a professor and not be disillusioned by what I see; instead, I’m excited by what I’m finding,” Wilks says. “I get to be part of certain traditions like Alumni Weekend that I connect with as a recent alum while also being able to represent the department and have those meaningful interactions with our students.”