Melissa Ames Melissa Ames is professor of English and director of English education at Eastern Illinois University. She is a coeditor of Women and Language: Gendered Communication Across Media, the editor of Time in Television Narrative: Explorin Temporality in Twenty-First-Century Programming, and a coauthor of How Pop Culture Shapes the Stages of a Woman's Life: From Toddlers-in-Tiaras to Cougars-on-the-Prowl. Read More Read Less