Ann earned her M.A. from Washington State University and her Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. Her areas of expertise include literary theory and cultural studies, 19th and 20th century American literature, women writers, feminist theory, and popular culture. She has published on a wide range of topics, including women-in-prison narratives, bromance films, the television series Mad Men, theories of the women’s movement in the 1970s, and social justice in American literature. Her most recent publication is The Outsiders: Adolescent Longing and Staying Gold, a study of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 teen film The Outsiders.
Listen to Dr. Ciasullo's Interview with The Write Stuff, a podcast by Gonzaga University Writing Center.
Publications
The Outsiders: Adolescent Tenderness and Staying Gold, Cinema and Youth Cultures Series, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2023.
“Back to the (Gendered) Future: Feminist Nostalgia in Netflix's Stranger Things and GLOW.” The 1980s Resurrected: Essays on the Decade in Popular Culture Then and Now, ed. Randy Laist. McFarland Press, 2023. 123-136.
“Afterword: In Love with the Past.” In Netflix Nostalgia: Streaming the Past on Demand, ed. Kathryn Pallister. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019. 235-242.
“Embattled Terrains: The Body as the Site of Social (In)justice in American Literature.” In Social Justice and American Literature, ed. Jeff Birkenstein and Robert Hauhart. Salem Press/Grey House, 2017. 34-50.
“‘This is what I’ve always wanted: Bromance and the Evolution of Male Intimacy in the Jump Street Films.” With David M. Magill. Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 6.3 (December 2015): 303-322.
“Strained Sisterhood: Lesbianism, Feminism, and the U.S. Women’s Liberation Movement.” In Provocations: A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought, ed. Susan Bordo, Ellen Rosenman, and M. Cristina Alcade. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. 292-300.
“The Lighter—and Weightier—Side of Mad: or Everything I Needed to Know about Gender and Sexuality I Learned from Dave Berg.” Studies in American Humor 3.30 (2014): 77-94. Reprinted in Seeing MAD: Essays on MAD Magazine’s Humor and Legacy, ed. Judith Yaross Lee and John Bird. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2020. 114-142.
“Not a Spaceship, but a Time Machine: Mad Men and the Narratives of Nostalgia.” Lucky Strikes and a Three-Martini Lunch: Thinking about Television's Mad Men, ed. Jennifer Dunn and Jimmie Manning. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. 14-26.
“What Do a Meaningless Secretary and a Humorless Bitch Have in Common? Everything. Or: Joan, Peggy, and the Convergence of Mad Men’s Career Girls.” Mad Men, Women, and Children, ed. Heather Marcovitch and Nancy Batty. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012. 19-31.
“Containing ‘Deviant’ Desire: Lesbianism, Heterosexuality, and the Women-in-Prison Narrative,” The Journal of Popular Culture 41.2 (2008): 195-223.
“Making Her (In)Visible: Cultural Representations of Lesbianism and the Lesbian Body in the 1990s,” Feminist Studies 27.3 (Fall 2001): 577-608. Reprinted in The Gender and Media Reader, ed. Mary Celeste Kearney. New York and London: Routledge, 2012. 329-343.
Contributor to The St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, ed. Tom and Sara Pendergast (Detroit: St. James Press, 2000): 292-294.
Book Reviews
Women Writing Cloth: Migratory Fictions in the American Imaginary by Mary Jo Bona. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 38.1 (Spring 2019): 243-245.
How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ. Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 36.2 (2019): 310-312. Invited Review.
Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, ed. Jackson R. Bryer and Nancy P. VanArsdale. Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 64.1 (Spring 2010). Online.
Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice, ed. Lawrence R. Broer and Gloria Holland. Cultural Analysis 5 (2006): R7-R11.
Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures in and beyond the Classroom by Brian Goldfarb. Feminist Teacher 15.2 (2005): 161-162.
Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism and Modern British Women’s Literature by Patricia Juliana Smith and The Lesbian Menace: Ideology, Identity, and the Representation of Lesbian Life by Sherrie A. Inness. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 17.2 (Fall 1998): 371-375.
Recordings
"Gonzaga's Writing Core" - Dr. Ann Ciasullo talks on the ins and outs of the writing process and tutoring. The Write Stuff, Episode 3, December 15, 2023. By Jack Talbott.
Thursday Arts (P)review: Idaho's Writer in Residence, "Escape to Margaritaville," Staying Gold. Spokane Public Radio, August 3, 2023. By E.J. Iannelli.
