Shem Fleenor earned his PhD in History from the University of Florida in 2015 and his MA from the New School for Social Research in New York City in 2010. He spent much of the decade since finishing his doctorate teaching and tutoring United States History, World History, Global Politics, English Language Arts, Advertising, “The Good Life,” Marketing in American Society, and various Humanities courses at the university and secondary level. Fleenor learned to write professionally as an undergraduate at The Independent Florida Alligator, the University of Florida’s newspaper–the largest student-run daily in the world, where he wrote feature stories as the style and culture editor.

As a scholar, Fleenor’s interdisciplinary research focuses primarily on consumer culture and communication technology in the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, with a special focus on what E.P Thompson referred to as working class consciousness. Fleenor’s research delves primarily into the social and cultural meaning and importance of film, television, music, advertising and various communication mediums. He focuses especially on the transformative power mass media can have on societies, cultures, and individuals – particularly during the transition from Agrarian to Industrial societies in the Nineteenth through Twentieth-century Atlantic World.

Fleenor, inspired by Frankfort School Scholars, has a special interest in the power of mass media to facilitate systems of control and to shape the human mind and spirit. He has a keen eye for exposing Pop Culture’s seedy underbelly from a sophisticated, street smart, erudite, acerbic and unique perspective. Fleenor enjoyed a memorable sabbatical full of travel, reading, writing, and photography in 2022 through the first half of 2024, primarily writing fiction, including the novel On the Lam from Uncle Sam, and making short films, including the award-winning Documentary Nascent, which was comprised entirely of archival footage and based on chapter one of Erik Barnouw’s monumental book, Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film. In 2024, he enjoyed extended stays in New York City, where he lived for most of the decade, then mountainous Almaty, Kazakhstan, and finally London, England, where he enjoyed long soul-searching treks along both sides of the River Thames.

In 2024, Fleenor moved to Austin, Texas, where he worked as a data annotation specialist and content rater whilst helping a Fortune-5 company refine its large language model in the hopes of coding something akin to a humanitarian’s consciousness into the company’s Artificial Intelligence. In 2025, Fleenor returned to his greatest passion; writing research articles that permit him to explore and unravel stories, mysteries, ideas, concepts, and anecdotes lost, forgotten, or at least underappreciated. The native of South Florida is the author of several research studies that include Marketing the Magic City: Miami and the Making of Modern America; Fighting for the Enlightenment: American Volunteers’ Spanish War Correspondence; Mad Men and the Specter of American Fascism; and a trilogy of studies about the life of Ramparts Magazine.

He’s also penned a few historical fiction novels including Seven Days in a Magic City of Sin; Letters Not Sent; and On the Lam from Uncle Sam. The former educator also compiled three didactic texts of music-centered interdisciplinary projects and pacing guides for secondary and university-level teachers of United States History, World History, and English Language Arts. Fleenor’s pedagogy makes use of mass media of the period studied to guide learners through the process of creatively engaging in projects designed to enrich and gamify the learning experience.