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Biography

Karen Dill-Shackleford earned her PhD in social psychology from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her dissertation on media violence has been cited 1,500 times. She testified twice before Congress about media use and everyday realities. Karen studies the way people seek and construct social meaning from media including fictional stories, especially in the context of fandom. She demonstrates how media can be used to enhance social justice, particularly related to issues involving race and gender. She also studies the benefits of using media to support a meditation practice to enhance psychological well being. Karen is the author of How Fantasy Becomes Reality, and the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Media Psychology. She is co-author of Mad Men Unzipped: Fans on Sex, Love, and the Sixties on TV (University of Iowa Press, 2015); and Finding Truth in Fiction: The Benefits of Getting Lost in a Story (Oxford University Press, 2015).