Her first book, Static in the System: Noise and the Soundscape of American Cinema Culture, was published by the University of California Press and was a finalist for the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology. Her second and third books, The Thinking Sex: Representations of Gender and Genius on Twenty-First Century Television and Echoes and Cries: The Aural Culture of America Under COVID-19 (a work of aural history on the COVID-19 pandemic in America) are currently in progress. She is also working on a series of articles related to a fourth book, called Sound Convergence: Listening to Twenty-First Century Media (a media archaeological work on the use of 21st century sound technologies).

 

She received her Ph.D from the Screen Cultures Program at Northwestern University in 2015. Her dissertation, Chatter, Reverberation, and the Static in the System: Noise in American Cinema Culture won the 2016 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Dissertation Award for the best dissertation submitted to the leading international organization for film and media studies.

Dr. Ward's research interests include cultural history as it relates to film, television, and moving image media; sound theory, analysis, and aural culture; media archaeology; the history of the senses as they relate to media interpretation and consumption;  media ecology; the history of film reception; and representations of mind and thought in media, as well as intellectual history. 

 

She has presented at conferences in the United States and Europe, and was a guest speaker at the Chicago Film Seminar. Her work has been included in multiple annual meetings of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and the annual Screen conference in Glasgow.

 

Her work has been published in the journals Music, Sound, and the Moving Image; Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film; and Sound Effects, as well as anthologies the Oxford Handbook for Cinematic Listening and Media, Popular Culture, and the American Century. She will appear in several upcoming collections as well.

 

She is affiliated faculty for the Johns Hopkins Center for Advanced Media Studies: the JHU division that awards media certificates to humanities Ph.D. students who do extensive research in film and media. 

 

She is the founder/designer of Studio North, JHU's student-run film production company that funds prestigious student projects. She is the founding Creative Director of the television Writers Room at Johns Hopkins. She founded the Johns Hopkins Film Festival for High School Students in 2017 and served as its first Administrative Director. She co-founded the Saul Zaentz High School Film Festival in 2019 and served as one of its two co-directors. She originated the Johns Hopkins Visiting Artist Series that hosted public Q&As and private workshops with top players in film and media from New York and Los Angeles, and served as its first director. 

 

She has served as an advisor to Woodrow Wilson fellows, PURA grant recipients, Arts Innovation Grant recipients, Women and Gender Studies grant recipients, and students writing senior humanities theses and completing their capstone projects.

 

Dr. Ward teaches on film and television analysis, theory, and history; popular culture studies; cultural theory; the intersection of media studies with philosophy and historiography; and the "moving image" as it is broadly defined. This includes cinema, television, social media, Internet and popular culture. She also teaches sound studies courses for the undergraduates and graduate populations. 

 

She was a finalist for the 2012 and 2013 Excellence in Teaching Awards, and the 2016 Undergraduate Advising Award. She won this award in 2020. She was also a second-round finalist for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Innovative Pedagogy Award in 2020.

 

From 2022-2024, she served as the Dean's Fellow for Undergraduate Mentorship for the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.