The Future of Reading, Writing + Scholarship

Speaker Details

Tara McPherson is associate professor of Gender and Critical Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Her Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke UP: 2003) received the 2004 John G. Cawelti Award for the outstanding book published on American Culture, among other awards. She is co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Duke UP: 2003) and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, part of the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008.) Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including Camera Obscura, The Velvet Light Trap, Discourse, and Screen, and in edited anthologies such as Race and Cyberspace, The New Media Book, The Object Reader, Virtual Publics, The Visual Culture Reader 2.0, and Basketball Jones. The anthology, Interactive Frictions, co-edited with Marsha Kinder, is forthcoming from the University of California Press, and she is currently working on a manuscript on the cultural and racial logics of code. Her new media research focuses on issues of convergence, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.

She is the founding editor of Vectors a multimedia peer-reviewed journal affiliated with the Open Humanities Press, and is one of three editors for the new MacArthur-supported International Journal of Learning and Media (launched by MIT Press in 2009.) Tara was among the founding organizers of Race in Digital Space, a multi-year project supported by the Annenberg Center for Communication and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. She is on the advisory board of the Mellon-funded Scholarly Communications Institute, is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Archives, has frequently served as an AFI juror, is a core board member of HASTAC www.hastac.org, and is on the boards of several journals. At USC, she co-directs (with Phil Ethington) the new Center for Transformative Scholarship and is a fellow at the Center for Excellence in Teaching. With major support from the Mellon Foundation, she is currently working with colleagues from Brown, NYU, Rochester, and UC San Diego and with several academic presses and archives to explore new modes of scholarship for visual culture research.

Amit Ray is associate professor in the Department of English, College of Liberal Arts, at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he specialized in postcolonial studies, working primarily with Simon Gikandi and Aamir Mufti. Dr. Ray’s first book, Negotiating the Modern (Routledge, 2007) explores the development of South Asian Orientalism and its impact upon European and Indian modernity.

He began working with wikis in 2004, initially examining their pedagogical possibilities in his teaching. He is currently working on a book project entitled “Writing Babel: Wikis, Authorship and Authority in the Public Sphere” that explores how the collaborative authoring environment of wikis impact the public sphere by challenging long-standing notions of authorship, authority, credit, and expertise. In particular, Dr. Ray investigates how distributed models of textuality present alternatives to copyright and proprietary media models, test government and corporate secrecy, provide for new models of distributed expertise, and generate novel opportunities for cross-cultural, trans-linguistic translation, dialogue, and debate.

Date:
Speakers:
Tara McPherson and Amit Ray
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