Terrier Volume 76, Number 1 - Spring 2012 | Page 8

Faculty Spotlight

Faculty Notes

Using Pop Culture to Solve Secrets of Real Crime

Professor Elizabeth Albrecht (English) read her
fiction at Writers Night, a Sarah Lawrence College
event held at Poets House.

W

Dr. Sophie Berman (Philosophy and Religious
Studies) delivered the lecture The Cartesian God
at St. John’s University.

hen Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia defended the use of torture
by Jack Bauer on the TV drama 24
to prevent a terrorist attack, it was a watershed
moment for Sociology and Criminal Justice
Professor Nickie Phillips.
“The issue isn’t the politics of the show but
how popular culture informs and reflects attitudes
and perceptions of crime and justice,” said
Phillips. “It’s about how we, as a society, package
and sell crime, whether it’s through the news
media, in movies and television shows, or even
when someone repackages something like graffiti
to sell on the mass market.”
The idea of the commodification of crime is one
part of Dr. Phillips’s class, Cultural Criminology,
which was most recently taught as an Honors
Seminar last spring. During the course, she
engages students in discussions about how
crime is portrayed in the news media and other
types of entertainment like reality TV, the Batman
Dark Knight movie and comic books.
“Criminologists have studied other forms of
popular culture like films and television shows,
but not comic books which are a rich resource for
class discussions on crime and crime control,”
said Phillips. “Justice is a major theme in comics,
with a lot of them focusing on how heroes
maintain legitimacy while operating outside the
boundaries of law. For example, comic readers
tell me it’s not OK for Superman to kill a bad guy.
But for someone like The Punisher, a gun-toting
vigilante, it doesn’t matter how many people die
as long as he defeats the villain.”
Phillips is now gathering her observations about
how crime is depicted in comic books into a book
to be published by NYU Press. She and John Jay

Professor Staci Strobl have researched the
best-selling and most talked about comics from
2001 to 2010. They’re looking at
both how crime is shown and how
readers respond to the way crime
and punishment is portrayed.
“We’ve delivered several
presentations on this topic at
conferences around North
America,