Dr. Tyler Solon Williams is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. He holds a PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University.

Tyler’s doctoral dissertation is “Understanding the Early Television Cartoon.” Accessible online, he is adapting it for publication as a journal article, and in the future as an academic book. He is currently preparing an anthology about television cartoon producers Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera with Kevin Sandler for the University Press of Mississippi, Hanna and Barbera: Conversations. His co-authored book chapter with independent animator Lev Cantoral, forthcoming from McFarland in 2022, is “Saturday Morning Trojan Mouse: The Origin of the Creator-Driven Television Cartoon.” He recently published a review of Kenneth Cmiel and John Durham Peters’ 2020 book Promiscuous Knowledge in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, as “A Cultural History of the Digital Present.”

Tyler’s research interests include intersections of animation, television, cinema, media theory, digital platforms, cultural history, genre, advertising, political economy, gender and sexuality, video games, music, and sound studies. He has presented papers at the annual conferences of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the International Communication Association, the Popular Culture Association, and the Society for Animation Studies.