Dr. Carrie Teresa Isard, associate professor and chair of communication and media studies at Niagara University, and her colleague, Dr. Mary Beth Ray, associate professor and chair of communication and media studies at Plymouth State University, were invited to discuss their collaboration, The Adolescentia Project, as part of the Graduate Speaker Series at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication on April 28, 2025.
The Adolescentia Project explores music consumption, self-discovery, media culture, and memory through a digital archive and edited collection of autoethnographic essays on albums we loved during adolescence.
Dr. Teresa discussed her work as co-curator of the digital archive and read from her chapter, "’Destroy the mind, destroy the body, but you cannot destroy the heart’: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and the Reclamation of a Teenage Fat Body During the ‘Age of Fatphobia.’”
“This chapter uses fat studies scholarship to frame my experience with the Smashing Pumpkins’ album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, within the social landscape of American fatphobia during the 1990s, which included—for me and many other fat teens during that period—incessant weight-base bullying and violence,” Dr. Teresa said. “The reflection illustrates the ways in which Mellon Collie, and in particular, the Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, helped me to accept and, eventually, embrace my experience as a fat teenage girl. Mellon Collie is the soundtrack to my reclamation of my body, myself, the space I take up, and my unwillingness to apologize for it.”
Dr. Teresa joined the faculty at Niagara University in 2014. Her research interests include critical studies in journalism history, ethnomusicology, and social identity. She is the author of “Looking at the Stars: Black Celebrity Journalism in Jim Crow America” and co-curator of The Adolescentia Project digital archive. She has published articles in American Historian, American Periodicals, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Howard Journal of Communications. She has also contributed to the Routledge Companion of American Journalism History and The Adolescentia Project: Essays on Music, Adolescence, and Identity.
Dr. Teresa holds a Ph.D. from Temple University, an M.L.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA from Villanova University.