Caroline Jack

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at UC San Diego. My research interests include media history, business history, and the history of media technologies, along with critical studies of advertising, corporate communication, and promotional culture.

At UCSD, I teach undergraduate courses focusing on the significance of advertising, persuasion, and promotional communication in social context. I also teach graduate seminars on critical-cultural studies of communication and promotional culture.

My book Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century is available via University of Chicago Press in October 2024. It reveals how American capitalism has been promoted in the most ephemeral of materials: public service announcements, pamphlets, educational films, and games—what I call “sponsored economic education media.” These items, which were funded by corporations and trade groups who aimed to “sell America to Americans,” found their way into communities, classrooms, and workplaces, and onto the airwaves, where they promoted ideals of “free enterprise” under the cloaks of public service and civic education. They offered an idealized vision of US industrial development as a source of patriotic optimism, framed business management imperatives as economic principles, and conflated the privileges granted to corporations by the law with foundational political rights held by individuals. This rhetoric remains dominant—a harbinger of the power of disinformation that so besets us today. Business as Usual reveals the funding, production, and distribution that together entrenched a particular vision of corporate responsibility—and, in the process, shut out other understandings of value and common care.

My graduate training spans communication studies, media studies, and business. I hold a Ph.D. in Communication from Cornell University. I also hold an M.A. in Communication and an M.B.A., both from Saint Louis University.

More information can be found at my website: www.cjack.org