with Prof. Jill Peterfeso
A popular quote attributed to Walt Disney is “If you can dream it, you can do it.” Building on the nearly dozen Disney courses she has taught in the past decade, Jill Peterfeso argues that if students can think it, they can do it – meaning, if they can think deeply, critically, and expansively about Disney, then students can do the transformative, intellectual heavy-lifting of a liberal arts education.
In this interactive presentation, aimed at an audience of undergraduates and educators, Jill Peterfeso shares some of her academic research and teaching experiences around Disney, the 100-year old multimedia entertainment giant known for creating films, franchises, theme parks, and modern America’s cultural imagination. Like her Disney courses, the presentation will invite audiences to consider Disney alongside critical thinking and critical feeling, the value in seeing the Disney company as an employer modeling the liberal arts, the pervasive power of Disney media and messaging, and the cultural impact of “Disneyfication.”
Walt Disney allegedly once said, “I make … entertainment, and then the professors tell me what it means.” Now, in 21st century classrooms, it’s not just the professors, but also the students who discover Disney – and tell us what it all means.
Jill Peterfeso is Eli Franklin Craven and Minnie Phipps Craven Professor of Religious Studies at Guilford College (Greensboro, NC). She is an ethnographer and cultural historian focused on American religion, gender, and creativity. Her first book, Womanpriest: Tradition and Transgression in the Contemporary Roman Catholic Church (Fordham UP, 2020), examined contemporary debates on women’s ordination in the Roman Catholic Church.
She has taught nearly a dozen Disney courses since 2015 and has spoken about Disney and teaching on podcasts including The Disney Dish and Adventures and Mousecapades. Her curiosity around Disney and pedagogy helped inspire the edited volume, Why the Magic Matters: Discovering Disney as a Laboratory for Learning (Bloomsbury 2025). She is working on a project exploring Disney as an American religion, tentatively titled “Disney’s Evangelizing and Enchanting of America.”
