Lucy March, Ph.D.

Lucy March is a scholar of digital culture and popular media. Her work explores how online environments shape cultural production and circulation, and how representations of gender, racial, and sexual identity manifest in digital culture.

Lucy March is a scholar of Internet cultures, popular music, and identity. She earned her PhD in Media and Communication from Temple University. The questions that drive her research include how representations of gender, racial, and sexual identity manifest in popular media, and how cultural production and circulation in online environments can reveal and reflect structural inequalities. Lucy’s work is highly interdisciplinary, and centers on the ways that people experience culture online through qualitative methodologies, including digital ethnography.

Lucy’s dissertation, which she is currently developing into a book manuscript, explores the phenomenon of digitally based popular music scenes, or “Internet music.” The project interrogates dynamics of cultural borrowing and hybridity through textual and discourse analyses informed by a deep immersion in Internet music spaces. This project also explores how the dynamics of the online platforms shape the characteristics of Internet music scenes, including their tendency toward anonymity, low barrier to entry, and blurred lines between producers and consumers. Ultimately, this project shows how social and cultural identities and differences come to be constructed and articulated in online environments, and how individuals are increasingly using popular media to make sense of their relationships with digital technologies. Lucy is also interested in the intersection of popular music and meme cultures, digital celebrity, and how platform dynamics impact these phenomena.

Her work has been published in Popular Communication, Television and New Media, and others, and has been presented at the annual conferences for the International Communication Association, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and the Cultural Studies Association (for which she also serves on the Governing Board). Lucy also has expertise in East Asian popular culture and music, and has lived and studied in Beijing and Taiwan.