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Beck Krefting is a Professor in the American Studies Department and Director of the Center for Leadership, Teaching, and Learning. She is affiliate faculty to Gender Studies, Black Studies, Intergroup Relations, and Media and Film Studies at Skidmore College. Her monograph, All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents (Johns Hopkins UP), charts the history and economy of “charged humor” or stand-up comedy aimed at social justice. She is a contributing author to edited collections some of which include: Hysterical!: Women in American Comedy (University of Texas Press, 2017), Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), The Joke Is On Us: Political Comedy in (Late) Neoliberal Times (Lexington Books, 2019), Ethics in Comedy: Essays on Crossing the Line (McFarland, 2020),Taking a Stand: American Stand-up Comedians as Public Intellectuals (University of Mississippi Press, 2021), and Punching Up: Stand-Up Comedy Speaking Truth to Power (Routledge, 2022). You can read about comedy’s role in #MeToo and Black Lives Matter Movements in a special issue published in Contemporary Political Theory (June 2021). She has published widely on Tasmanian comedian Hannah Gadsby, including in special issues in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (2019), Studies in American Humor (2019), and in the European Journal of American Studies (2024).Most recent publications include a foreword for Politics of Recognition and Representation in Indian Stand-Up (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), and chapters in the Cambridge Companion to Stand-Up Comedy (2024) and the The Oxford Handbook of Screen Comedy (2025). Beck has been invited to speak about her research at colleges and universities domestically and internationally, most recently at universities in Germany and Hungary. Her current book project is tentatively titled: When Comedy Kills: Racialized and Gendered Violence in the Wake of Laughter.