Dr. Kara McCormack received her PhD in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Since then, she has been a lecturer in the humanities and a Thinking Matters Fellow at Stanford University, a visiting lecturer at Tufts University, and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Regional Studies at the University of New Mexico. She is currently an assistant professor in American Culture and Literature at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Her research focuses on cultural studies, popular culture, U.S. history, cultural memory, and film studies, with emphases on the U.S. West and science/dystopian fiction.
Her first book, Imagining Tombstone: The Town Too Tough to Die, was published by the University Press of Kansas in the spring of 2016. This work explores the ways popular culture, the concepts of history and authenticity, preservation, and economic exigencies interact in the historic western town of Tombstone, Arizona, as well as the ways Tombstone and the mythic West have circulated worldwide.
Her specialties include cultural studies, popular culture, cultural history, film studies, media and society, visual and material culture, public history, public humanities, cultural memory, the U.S. West, utopian and dystopian fiction, and science fiction.