Nancy Johnson-Hunt is a former advertising suit and strategist turned Ph.D. Candidate and popular culture scholar at Auckland University of Technology. After a decade-long career within the advertising and marketing industry, both in New Zealand and North America, she has recently returned to AUT, joining the Popular Culture Research Centre. Her 2012 Honour’s Dissertation at AUT, ‘Beyond Skin Deep’, investigated the (re)presentation of ethnic beauty, and the emergence of ethnic ambiguity in an annual circulation of NZ Fashion Quarterly magazine. Her research interests include the diffusion of advertising culture, the construction of ethnic and racial identity in popular culture, and the influence of the media in shaping everyday lives and stories. Upon her return to academia, Nancy has been published in the 2020 ‘Dream’ Issue of M/C Journal (Journal of Media and Culture) in a paper titled “Dreams for Sale: Ideal Beauty in the Eyes of the Advertiser”. Alongside her academic interests, her work in fashion and retail has remained extensive, from brand strategy and marketing for The Warehouse Group, to in-store styling for the likes of brands such as Juliette Hogan and Wixii. She is currently writing a book of essays on motherhood through the BIPOC lens and hopes to continue to create intersectional work which resonates across nuanced topics of womanhood, race and identity.
Ph.D. - Popular Culture
Auckland University of Technology
2020 – (in progress)
Honors degree - Communications Studies (Creative Industries)
Auckland University of Technology
2012 – 2013
Bachelor’s Degree - Journalism, Public Relations, Business
Auckland University of Technology
2007 – 2010
Johnson-Hunt, N. (2020). Dreams for Sale: Ideal Beauty in the Eyes of the Advertiser. M/C Journal, 23(1). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1646
Johnson-Hunt, N. (2021). Young Adult Gothic Fiction: Monstrous Selves/Monstrous Others, Michelle J. Smith and Kristine Moruzi (eds)(2021). Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, 10(1-2), 159-161.
Piatti-Farnell, L., Johnson-Hunt, N. (2023). Vampires and Desire: Blood, Sex, and Ritual in Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Fiction. In: Bacon, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82301-6_95-1
Johnson-Hunt, N. (2023). We’re Human Too, You Know”: Tethered Journeys and Shadowed Struggles in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019). In S. Bacon (Ed.). Female Identity in Contemporary Fictional Purgatorial Worlds (pp. 221–237). London, Bloomsbury Academic.
2021 - Symposium on ‘Identity and Popular Culture’
Hosted Online by the Popular Culture Research Centre, AUT 1st-2nd September 2021
Title of Paper: What’s the Catch?: Indian Matchmaking in Reality TV Romance
2022 - “Gothic Trajectories” GANZA Interim Conference
Hosted Online 27th – 28th January 2022
Title of Paper: Liberating the Grotesque: The Transmogrification of Racial Identities on Lovecraft Country
2022 - 'See and Be Seen: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Storytelling and Identity in Popular Culture', to be held on 13-14 September 2022
Title of Co-Authored Paper: “I want to believe in romance”: The representation of queer and racial identities in Netflix’s Heartstopper (2022-)
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