Brian L. Ott is a teacher and scholar of media and rhetorical studies in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado, Denver. His chief research interest concerns media texts and how they prepare people to live their everyday lives in socially responsible and civic-minded ways.
Ott has written more than 30 journal articles and book chapters. His research has appeared in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Text and Performance Quarterly, Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies (CSCM), The Journal of Popular Culture, Western Journal of Communication, and Women's Studies in Communication. Ott is author of The Small Screen: How Television Equips Us to Live in the Information Age and Critical Media Studies: An Introduction, as well as a co-editor of It's Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era and Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials. He is a former editor of the Western Journal of Communication.