Zane Austin Willard is a cultural critic and scholar of communication and cultural studies. Zane’s research and teaching interests are in critical cultural and media studies, surveillance studies, and queer theory and gender and sexuality studies. Analyzing popular culture and legal and political discourse, his work considers the ubiquity of surveillance culture’s implications for minoritized communities, particularly queer communities, and emphasizes the racialized, classed, and gendered dimensions of surveillance in the neoliberal state and techno-culture.

Zane’s scholarship has been published in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Communication, Culture, and Critique, the Journal of Communication Inquiry, Communication Teacher, and the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. He has presented his scholarship at the annual conventions of the National Communication Association, American Studies Association, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and the Southern States Communication Association.

Currently, Zane is a doctoral candidate and graduate teaching associate in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida, a graduate instructional assistant of communication education in USF’s College of Engineering, and an adjunct instructor in the Department of Communication at the University of Tampa where in Spring 2025 he served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Studies.

For 2025, he is the Chair for the Graduate Student Committee of NCA’s Activism and Social Justice Division. Committed to expanding critical cultural scholarship across disciplines, he is a Graduate Student Affiliate of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill and an Elinor Ostrom Fellow at the Mercatus Center for Social, Economic, and Political Thought at George Mason University. He is also a two-time alumnus of the Mercatus Center’s Frederic Bastiat Fellowship and a former Don Lavoie Fellow.

Zane earned his Master’s in Communication with an emphasis in media and culture from USF and his Bachelor’s from the University of Tampa with a triple major in Economics, Communication, and Film & Media Arts and minors in History and Cinema Studies.