Alexandra Bevan

Dr. Alexandra Bevan is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media in the School of Communication and Arts within the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Queensland. Her research focuses on the relationship among gender, technological change, and space. She investigates how new technologies inform the design and representation of space and how media portrayals of women are used as a vehicle for addressing technological change and transformations in lived space. Bevan employs methodological approaches that combine textual analysis of media content with industry-facing methods, such as interviews with industry professionals, conversations about designing space, and analyses of lived spaces. Her work covers television representations of gender, the female body in narratives around nationhood, online archives and their relation to gender, fashion history, surveillance, and creative work in television history.

Bevan's first book, The Aesthetics of Nostalgia TV: Production Design and the Boomer Era (Bloomsbury, 2019), offers an industry ethnography of the people designing sets and costumes for nostalgic US television programmes. It addresses how questions around gender play out on television alongside larger concerns around historical progress and regress attached to technological change. Her publications appear in leading journals including Feminist Media Studies, Convergence, Celebrity Studies, Cinema Journal, Surveillance & Society, and Television & New Media. Key articles include "Surveillance Media Technology and News Coverage of Stranger Violence Against Women in Australia" (Feminist Media Studies, 2025), "Feeling Safe: Safety App Discourse and Affective Labor" (Convergence, 2024), "Jon Hamm's Post-Mad Men Persona and Representations of Hegemonic Masculinity" (Celebrity Studies, 2023), "Designed for Threat: Surveillance, Mass Shootings, and Pre-emptive Design in School Architecture" (Surveillance & Society, 2019), and "The National Body, Women and Mental Health in Homeland" (Cinema Journal, 2015). Currently, Bevan's project examines representations of gender violence in popular media, including depictions of stranger violence and domestic violence, as well as safety discourses in technology and spatial design. She teaches Multimedia (first-year) and Digital Project (third-year) courses. Bevan has presented extensively at conferences such as the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and produced the podcast Never Been Cool (2017).

Professional Email: a.bevan@uq.edu.au