Rhonda Wilcox

Rhonda V. Wilcox, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita at Gordon State College (Georgia). She has been writing about good television since the last century. She is a former editor of Studies in Popular Culture, a cofounding editor of Critical Studies in Television, and the cofounder and coeditor of Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy+. She is the author of Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2005); she is the coeditor, with David Lavery, of Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2002); with Tanya R. Cochran, of Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier (2008); with Sue Turnbull, of Investigating Veronica Mars: Essays on the Teen Detective Series (2011); and with Tanya R. Cochran, David Lavery, and Cynthea Masson, of Reading Joss Whedon (2014). Her most recent monograph, Grimm’s Trailer Full of Secrets: Character and Gender in the Television Series, was published in 2022. She is currently preparing a collection on the Apple TV+ series Severance with Heather Porter and Michael Starr. She has also contributed many essays to various anthologies and peer-reviewed journal articles in the field of popular culture.

She is a founder and past president of the Association for the Study of Buffy+ (formerly the Whedon Studies Association) and a past president and the current president of the Popular Culture Association in the South. With David Lavery, she started the Slayage conferences--which have met every two years, starting in 2004, most recently in 2024 at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California.

In 2024, she received the national Popular Culture Association’s Lynn Bartholome Eminent Scholar Award.

She lives in Decatur, Georgia, where, for 41 years, she was married to and partnered with writer/musician/photographer Richard Gess. She is the mother of motion designer Jeff Gess. She has lectured around the world on the television series that she loves, helping to wake people up to the reality that television can be art.