Online Catalogs of Dissertations and Theses
Dissertations are book-length scholarly works submitted for completion of the Ph.D. They aren't "published" in the same sense as books and articles, but can be useful tools for identifying new scholarship and bibliographies. Theses in the U.S. are typically submitted for completion of a Masters degree, although terminology differs by country.
- ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new window
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Index to doctoral dissertations from 1637 to the present, with abstracts since 1980. A number of master's theses are also indexed, with abstracts since 1988. Many are available for download in pdf format. UCLA has access to all full text dissertations in the database. Non-UCLA users may use Dissertations Express to purchase digital or print copies of individual dissertations. - WorldCat Dissertations and Theses This link opens in a new window
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Over 5 million dissertations and theses available in OCLC member libraries. Many theses are available electronically, at no charge, directly from the publishing institution. UCLA students, faculty, and staff can request non-UCLA dissertations via interlibrary loan. - eScholarship, University of California This link opens in a new window
UC's open access repository. Contains books, journals, working papers, conference publications, postprints, theses, and dissertations.
Selected Dissertations on Reality Television
- "Money Talks, Wealth Whispers" Real Housewives’ Legacy: Class Ambivalence and Emotional Camping / by Evie Psarras
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Dissertation (Ph.D.) — University of Illinois at Chicago, 2020.
Real Housewives (RH) is a global reality television franchise comprised of seven series in the United States. Dedicated to showcasing highly-feminized women, wealth, and materialism, RH gained prominence throughout the Great Recession. Since RH reached phenomenal status in popular culture at a time of economic insecurity and class resentment, I wondered what it might be communicating about class in the U.S. This research is grounded by a three-pronged approach to media, which includes textual analysis of media content, discussion of production, and audience reception (Kellner, 2011). - Producing Reality Stardom: Constructing, Programming, and Branding Celebrity on Reality Television / by Lindsay Nicole Giggey
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Dissertation (Ph.D.) — University of California, Los Angeles, 2017.
Celebrity is a cultural construct that tends to hide the complex labor processes that make it possible. This dissertation unpacks how celebrity status is the product of a great deal of seldom recognized work and calls attention to the hidden infrastructures that support the production, maintenance, and promotion of celebrity on reality television. Given particular forms of temporality involved in both television programming cycles and celebrity itself, this dissertation details how the management of time serves as a defining aspect of contemporary media branding. - Reading Reality Television: Publicizing, Promoting, and Commodifying the Self / by Tamar Salibian
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Dissertation (Ph.D.) — Claremont Graduate University, 2020.
This dissertation investigates the ways that ideology is dispensed through popular media to drive the commodification of the self. These ideologies are reinforced in the televisual texts examined in this research with the use of self-reflexivity and metacommentary. The use of these tactics creates an onscreen illusion of transparency to co-opt the viewer with the suggestion of authenticity, familiarity, and openness to inscribe the televisual and its visual codes with meaning to perpetuate messages that support consumerism, hegemony, and power. - Turning Trash into Treasure: Reality Television, Media Governance and Secondary Markets / by Sean T. Leavey
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Dissertation (Ph.D.) — Rutgers School of Graduate Studies, 2018.
In the wake of the Great Recession (2007-2009), a subgenre of reality television (RTV) surfaced that focused on buying and selling old and used things, largely antiques and collectibles, at auctions, pawn shops, flea markets and other secondary market sites. This subgenre, which I have termed Trash and Treasure TV, included programs such as American Pickers (2010- present), Storage Wars (2010-present) and Flea Market Flip (2012-present), and emerged at the exact moment when people needed to cope with the consequences of the financial downturn. Following media theorists Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Trash and Treasure TV is positioned here as a technique of governmentality that provided viewers with “how-to guides” for learning to participate in the secondary market.