Dr. McClennen directs Penn State's Center for Global Studies as well as its Latin American Studies program and has ties to the departments of Comparative Literature, Spanish, and Women's Studies. She most recently authored Colbert's America: Satire and Democracy (2012) and Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope (2010).  Her book-in-progress, Globalization and Latin American Cinema, focuses on the ways that a number of films from Latin America reflect national and international cultural policies, shifts in production and consumption of cinema, and changing identity constructions.

 

In addition to her books she has edited a number of journal special issues and published over 50 essays on a range of topics all of which coalesce around the question of how culture, politics, and society intersect. Her work often analyzes the links between political events and their media representations, which has led her to critique the relationship between mainstream culture, political praxis, stereotypes, and social injustice. She also publishes on cultural responses to social conflict such as those associated with war, imperialism, state formation, immigration and exile, dictatorship, patriarchy, and globalization.

 

In 2006 she was the Fulbright Research Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and she has also held a Fulbright faculty award in Peru. She has taught in Chile, Canada, Germany, and Peru, and has conducted research in those countries as well as in Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Spain, Guatemala, Uruguay, and Costa Rica.

 

She has also conducted research on education and international area studies, with particular attention to how multidisciplinary approaches enhance understanding of global issues. She teaches courses in cultures of globalization, human rights culture, global media, the cultures of displaced peoples, cultural trade policy, and theories of globalization.