ALEX SYMONS, PhD
Author ◆ Speaker ◆ Media & Communication Commentator
Online Presence:
Media Studies Network
YouTube Channel
Invited Speaker
Lectures, Interviews, Discussions
Alex Symons is a leading media scholar who has been invited and funded to provide insightful commentary on creativity, industry, and audiences, for 20 years, spanning historic Hollywood and indie film, TV, personal branding, YouTube, podcasting, social media, and public media.
He is Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies at LIM College in New York City, earned his PhD from the University of Nottingham, and continues to author of original books, chapters, and journal articles on media and popular culture.
Speaking Engagements:
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Keynote Address, Media and Celebrity Studies Conference
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American Sociological Association
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Distinguished Lecturer Series, University of Hartford
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Film & History Conference
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Fan Studies Network North America
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Popular Culture Association
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Critical Studies in Television Conference
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University of Glamorgan
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De Montfort University
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Manchester Metropolitan University
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University of Salford
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LIM College
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Sacred Heart University
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University of Nottingham
Books
On public media
BBC Television Comedy Since the 2000s:
Corporate Innovation and Changing National Identity
This book examines how BBC Television's embrace of new executive voices, digital technology, and independent production companies in the early 2000s gave rise to a new era of innovation in comedy, aesthetically and culturally.
Drawing on exclusive interviews with key industry figures, the book traces these corporate innovations, with a focus on the shift from traditional analogue pathways to digital platforms. The author explores how BBC Three's launch, alongside iPlayer streaming and YouTube integration, enabled a new generation of creators to develop aesthetically experimental series that expressed diverse British identities for younger audiences.
Demonstrating how new corporate thinking and digital platforms democratized comedy creation, moving beyond establishment gatekeepers to showcase working-class, immigrant, and minority voices, this comprehensive analysis reveals how these changes made BBC comedy more inclusive and representative of contemporary British society while maintaining its public service mission.
Featuring extensive and fascinating interviews with key players responsible for series such as Ideal and Man Like Mobeen, this book is essential for anyone interested in contemporary UK television and humour, making a convincing case for the centrality of comedy to the BBC's public duties."
Brett Mills, Honorary Professor, University of East Anglia, author of The Sitcom and Television Sitcom
Books
On digital platforms
Women Comedians in the Digital Age:
Media Work and Critical Reputations After Trump
This book offers a thorough examination of digital work by women comedians in the US, exploring their use of digital media to perform jokes, engage with fans, remake their reputations, and become political activists. This book argues that despite its many adverse effects, digital work is changing comedy, empowering women to create new comic forms and negotiate the contentious political climate incited by former President Donald. J. Trump.
Chapters are focused on video podcasting, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and the streaming platform Netflix – each containing informative case studies on significant women comedians who use them, including Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, Leslie Jones, Mindy Kaling, Colleen Ballinger, Lilly Singh, Ms. Pat, Whitney Cummings, Issa Rae, and others. To understand their strategies, this book examines the popularity of their digital content, their career outcomes in television and film, as well as the ups and downs of their critical reputations in magazines, newspapers, the trade press, and with their participatory audiences online.
Women Comedians in the Digital Age is a compelling, informative, and highly readable study that will appeal to anyone interested in comedy, media (especially media labour), the cultivation of celebrity, and even professional development and advancement under neoliberalism."
Kirsten Leng, Associate Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Women Comedians would serve as an exceptional supplementary text for those teaching in media-related fields, even those not specifically focused on gender.... The book would also be of interest to casual readers interested in the field of comedy or social media entrepreneurship."
Christine Bord, University at Albany
Books
On Hollywood and television
Mel Brooks in the Cultural Industries:
Survival and Prolonged Adaptation
Which strategies has Mel Brooks used to survive, adapt and thrive in the cultural industries? How has he gained his reputation as a multimedia survivor? Alex Symons takes a unique, artist-focused approach in order to systematically identify the range of Brooks’s adaptation strategies across the Hollywood film, Broadway theatre and American television industries.
By combining a cultural industries approach together with that of adaptation studies, this book also identifies an important new industrial practice employed by Brooks - defined here as ‘prolonged adaptation’. More significantly, Symons also employs this method to explain the so far neglected way that Brooks’s adaptations have contributed towards changing production trends, changes in critical attitudes, and towards the ongoing integration of the cultural industries today.
"This original study not only provides an informative discussion of Mel Brooks' career but also demonstrates how the engines of contemporary culture are fueled by the continual recycling and adaptation of familiar material."
James Naremore,
Indiana University
"an excellent study that will surely prove useful to scholars and students alike."
Jerry C. Jaffe, Lake Erie College, Journal of Popular Culture.
Chapters & Articles
Varied new Subjects
“The ‘Digital Underground’ of Low-Budget, Retro-Slashers: Angelica De Alba and Paul Ragsdale’s Streets of Vengeance (2016), Slashlorette Party (2020) and Murdercise (2023).Wickham Clayton, ed. Style and Form in the Slasher Film II: Beyond Hollywood.
Palgrave MacMillan (in press, 2026).
“Audience Resistance to Hollywood’s ‘Post-Iraq’ Movies: War Dogs (2016), War Machine(2017), and Vice (2018),” in Marcus Harmes and Meredith Harmes, ed. Armed Farces: Essays on War-Themed Film and Television Comedy (2026).
“Reclaiming Mind Your Language (ITV, 1977-1979): Mocking White Masculinity in PostImperial Britain.” Chapter for Men Behaving Badly: Masculinity in British Situation Comedies,eds. Robert Shail and Steven Gerrard. Palgrave MacMillan. Book under review with publisher.
“Gopniks, Babushkas and Chernobyl: The Cultural Activism of Western and Russian YouTuberDocumentaries in the European Former Soviet Union,” in Levi Dean, Zhaoyu Zhu, VikrantKishore, Thomas William Whyke and Richard Frenneaux, eds. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Contemporary Global Documentary. Bloomsbury. Book under review with publisher.
Disruptors in Media Rituals: Ash Sarkar's 'Playful Rebellion' in Converging Television News," Celebrity Studies (2024)
Transcultural Comedy in Man Like Mobeen (2017-2023): How the BBC is Merging “Us”/“Them.” Journal of Popular Film and Television (2023)
“Podcast Comedy and ‘Authentic Outsiders’: How New Media is Challenging the Owners of Industry.” Celebrity Studies (2017).
“An Audience for Mel Brooks’s The Producers: The Avant-garde of the Masses.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 34.1 (2006).
Book Chapters & Journal Articles
Alex Symons, PhD
Author | Speaker | Media and Cultural Commentator
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