Keynote Biographies
Siva Vaidhyanathan
Associate Professor of Media Studies
University of Virginia
Siva Vaidhyanathan is a cultural historian and media scholar, and the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004). His most recent book is the edited (with Carolyn de la Pena) collection, Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). His forthcoming book, The Googlization of Everything: How One Company is Disrupting Culture, Commerce, and Community — And Why We Should Worry, will be published in 2009.
Vaidhyanathan has written for many periodicals, including American Scholar, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, MSNBC.COM, Salon.com, openDemocracy.net, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Nation. After five years as a professional journalist, Vaidhyanathan earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Columbia University, New York University, and now is an associate professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia and a fellow at both the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the Future of the Book. He lives in Charlottesville, VA.
Ken Hillis (discussant)
Ken Hillis is a professor of media studies in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Dr. Hillis’ research focuses on the politics of communication technologies, with an emphasis on virtual reality. His interests include information technology, electronically mediated communication, the technologization of politics and the “public sphere,” construction of identity and minority body politics and social change. He is the author of Digital Sensations: Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality (Minnesota, 1999), co-editor of Everyday eBay: Culture, Collecting and Desire (Routledge, 2006), and Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign (Duke). Hillis is also assembling an anthology on topics related to online search and the cultures and political economies it supports.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Associate Professor
Department of Modern Culture and Media
Brown University
Wendy Chun is an associate professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), and co-editor (with Thomas Keenan) of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2006). She has been a visiting associate professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a Wriston Fellow at Brown. She is currently finishing a monograph entitled Programmed Visions (forthcoming MIT, 2010) and working two new projects: a collaborative project/monograph entitled, Imagined Networks and a Mellon-funded Visual Studies Collaboratory
Jenny Sundén (discussant)
Jenny Sundén is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media Technology, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. She has published primarily on new media, cultural studies, feminism, queer theory, and the arts and science of robotics and medical simulation. She is the author of Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment (Peter Lang, 2003) as well as a co-editor of Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights: Gender and Digital Media in a Nordic Context (Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2007) and Second Nature: Origins and Originality in Art, Science and New Media (forthcoming).
Megan Boler
Professor
Department of Theory & Policy Studies
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto
Megan M. Boler is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Theory and Policy Studies, at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. She is Associate Faculty of the Center for the Study of United States and the Knowledge Media Design Institute also at UT. Her books include Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (NY: Routledge 1999); Democratic Dialogue in Education: Troubling Speech, Disturbing Silences (M. Boler, ed., Peter Lang, 2004); and Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008). She is currently completing a three-year funded research project, “Rethinking Media, Citizenship and Democracy: Digital Dissent after 9/11,” through interviews and surveys examines the motivations of producers of “digital dissent”–practices of digital media to counter mainstream media.
Her web-based productions include a study guide to accompany the documentary The Corporation (dirs. Achbar and Abbott 2003), and the multimedia website Critical Media Literacy in Times of War. Boler’s essays have been published in such journals as Educational Theory, Cultural Studies, and Women’s Studies Quarterly; recent publications include M. Boler, Guest Editor with Ted Gournelos, “Irony and Politics: User-Producers, Parody, and Digital Publics,” Electronic Journal of Communication (September 2008), and M. Boler, “The Politics of Making Truth Claims: The Responsibilities of Qualitative Research,” in Methodological Dilemmas of Qualitative Research, ed. Kathleen Gallagher (Routledge 2008). She teaches philosophy, cultural studies, feminist theory, media studies, social equity courses in Teacher Education program, and media studies at the Knowledge Media Design Institute at University of Toronto.
Caroline Bassett (discussant)
Dr. Caroline Bassett researches and teaches in the Department of Media and Film at the University of Sussex and is Director of the Centre for Material Digital Culture [CMDC].
Her research is focused on new media and she has published widely on gender and ICTs, narrative and new media, media innovation and the transformation of everyday life, with an emphasis on mobile and intimate media and globalization. Recent work explores media/medium theory in relation to cultural politics.
She is the convenor of the Digital Media MA at Sussex and also teaches courses on globalization, everyday life, and media theory, amongst other things
