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As a doctoral student at the ºù«ÍÞÊÓƵ, Tammy Rae Matthews united her passions — sport, media, language and gender — in her primary research, which includes historical and contemporary representations of transgender athletes in sport media. Her additional interests are in education, global and domestic culture, new media, interpersonal relationships, travel, art, technology and business. Specializing in Journalism Studies, she earned her Ph.D. in Media Research and Practice.

Matthews, a native Chicagoan, worked in major-market print media for nearly 15 years. She was the special sections editor for the Chicago Sun-Times as well as for its north suburban editions of the Pioneer Press. She continued as a freelance editor and reporter for several years after relocating to Colorado. During her professional (and thus insider) experience, Matthews witnessed various linguistic and language performance practices in areas related to the political economy of media as well as related to issues of power in socially oriented discourse and language practices. In the academy, Matthews applies sociolinguistics, semiotics and linguistic anthropology to discourse analysis. Her dissertation focus is at the intersection of gender, media and sport in Namibia, Africa. Matthews earned her Master’s of Science in Public Communication and Technology degree from Colorado State University’s Department of Journalism and Media Communication. There, she won the 2015-2016 Graduate Teaching Instructor of the Year award. Before graduate school, Matthews earned a certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and taught English to Tibetan refugees near Dharamsala, India. As an undergraduate, Matthews received her Bachelor’s of Journalism, with a magazine-editing emphasis, from the University of Missouri-Columbia’s School of Journalism.