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ABOUT / PEOPLE

The participants in this project bring expertise in consumer behavior, fan cultures, storytelling, popular music, intellectual property, digital communication, branding and advertising, global media flows, technology consumption, entertainment marketing and management, new product and service development, international cinema, television, and performance. The key players are:

Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including

  • Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture.
  • Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture.
  • From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games.

He writes monthly columns on media and cultural change for Technology Review Online and Computer Games magazine. He is one of the principal investigators for The Education Arcade, a consortium of educators and business leaders working to promote the educational use of computer and video games. He was also one of the principal investigators on a collaboration with Initiative Media to monitor audience response to American Idol with an eye towards developing new approaches to audience measurement. He is currently completing a book, Convergence Culture, which deals with the shifting relations of media producers and consumers in an age of media change. He has a MA in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught at MIT for fifteen years.

William Uricchio is Professor and Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He has held visiting professorships at Stockholm University, the Freie Universitat Berlin, and Philips Universitat Marburg, and is particularly interested in comparative national constructions of media, trans-national content flows, and the ways that media are drawn upon for identity purposes in European and American cultural settings. Between 2000-2005, he led a five-year cultural identity project within the Changing Media Changing Europe initiative of the European Science Foundation. His broader research, supported by Guggenheim, Fulbright and Humboldt research awards, considers the transformation of media technologies into cultural practices, and their role in (re-) constructing representation, knowledge and publics.

His current work takes up these issues by considering collaboration and collective identities in peer-to-peer communities, their relations to cultural citizenship, and their implications for new forms of cultural production. His forthcoming books include Media Cultures, on responses to media in post 9/11 Germany and the US; Media and New Collectivities in Europe, on the relationship between media for identities; he is also completing a manuscript on the concept of the televisual, from the 17th century to the present.

Jing Wang is S. C. Fang Professor of Chinese Language and Culture. A specialist in Chinese cultural studies, she has been researching consumer culture in contemporary China with a special focus on advertising and branding. She spent the summer of 2002 at Ogilvy in Beijing working with strategic planners. During the summer of 2004, she returned to Ogilvy Beijing once again as a visiting consultant. She designed a music and youth culture project project for Ogilvy in Beijing.

She has published on a variety of subjects, including an award-winning book The Story of Stone that reconstructs the mythology and folklores of stone and jade in Chinese literature and culture. Her more recent publications are focused on advertising, media, and the corporate culture in China. She is currently completing a book manuscript Brand New China: Advertising and the Production of Commercial Culture. Representative chapters include: "Brand Positioning and the 360 Degree Brand Stewardship," "The Synergy Buzz in China: Wahaha-Danone Partnership and the Rustication Gambit of Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble," "Chinese Super Brands and Corporate Culture," "Bobos in China? Lifestyle Cultures and the Rise of the Neo-tribal Logic," "Hello Moto: Cool Culture, Cell Phones, and Music Marketing." She is developing a new research interest in the mobile data industry in China.

Thomas DeFrantz holds degrees from Yale, the City University of New York, and earned his PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. He has taught at Stanford, NYU, and at MIT, where he is Associate Professor and holds the Class of 1948 Career Development Professorship. He is also the acting Associate Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. He teaches courses on Hip-Hop, Theater, and Dance. He has published widely, including recent essays on break dancing and afro-futurist filmmaking. Among his current research projects is Playing For Life, a global exploration of changes in hip-hop taste across three years by teenagers conducted in Australia, New Zealand, London, and the United States. A director and choreographer, he has affiliations with the Drama League of New York, the Theater Offensive of Boston, and the performance research group Slippage: Performance Interventions in Culture and Technology, in residence at MIT.

Edward Barrett is Senior Lecturer in Writing at MIT and serves as General Editor for the MIT Press Series on Digital Communication, which he founded. His books on digital media include Contextual Media: Multimedia and Interpretation, Sociomedia, The Society of Text: Hypertext, Hypermedia, and the Social Construction of Information, and Text, ConText, and HyperText. He is currently at work on his next book, Digital Poetry, which will be published in 2005. He has co-authored two textbooks on communication: The MIT Guide to Teaching Web Site Design, and The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing. He has also published six volumes of poetry. He serves on the board of several journals devoted to research in digital media. At MIT he teaches classes on digital poetry, non-linear and interactive narrative and digital communication. He holds a Ph.D. in English and American Language and Literature from Harvard University.

Ian Condry is Assistant Professor of Japanese cultural studies in the Foreign Languages and Literatures section of MIT. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, his research explores ethnographically the intersection of culture and commerce with a focus on music in Japan, the second largest media market in the world. He is writing a book about Japanese hip-hop, which analyzes the ways synergies between local artists, fans, and media professionals produced a distinctive historical evolution of the style in Japan. His newer research explores changes in the global music industry, and the creative potential of digital file sharing. In Asia, different legal, technological, and cultural settings provide key perspectives on the variety of possible futures for global media industries. He received degrees from Harvard (BA, Government, 1987) and Yale (Ph.D., Anthropology, 1999). He has been awarded research fellowships from Fulbright (1995-97) and Harvard's Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies (2000-01).

Robert V. Kozinets is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Business. An anthropologist by training, he also has extensive consulting experience with over 500 corporations, including IBM, EDS, TV Guide, Novartis, Mediacom, and Interrep. He has won the Kellogg School of Management’s Sidney Levy Teaching Award and taught courses in new product and service development, ethnographic consumer research, and entertainment marketing. His research interests include media and entertainment marketing and management, brand management, virtual communities, technology consumption, and subcultures and community-related marketing.

He has written and published articles on Star Trek, ESPN Zone, American Girl, The X-Files, Burning Man, retro brands, coffee connoisseurs, Wal-Mart, and themed flagship brand stores for journals such as the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, Consumption, Markets and Culture, the European Management Journal, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography and the Journal of Retailing. His lead-authored article on themed flagship brandstores recently won the Journal of Retailing’s Davidson Prize. He has also written and co-written chapters for books such as Kellogg on Marketing, Elusive Consumption, Contemporary Consumption Rituals, and Time, Space and the Market.

Grant McCracken holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in cultural anthropology. He has been the director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School, a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge and he is now an adjunct professor at McGill University. He is the author of several books including Culture and Consumption and The Long Interview. He has consulted widely in the corporate world, including the Coca-Cola Company, IKEA, Chrysler, Kraft, Kodak, and Kimberly Clark. He is a member of the IBM ThinkPad marketing advisory counsel. This spring, Indiana University Press will publish a new book: Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning and Brand Management. IUP will publish three more books (Plenitude, Transformation and Flock and Flow) over the next 12 months.

Jason Mittell is an Assistant Professor of American Civilization and Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College. His book – Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge, 2004) – offers a new approach to exploring television genres as cultural categories as utilized by television industries and audiences. He is currently writing a new book on contemporary developments in American television narratives and how they intersect with shifts in the television industry, media technology, and audience practices. He is also consulting with Initiative Media on the use of micro-genre categories by television audiences. His research areas include television history and criticism, animation and children's media, genre and narrative theory, taste cultures and media, and new media studies & technological convergence. He has received degrees from Oberlin College (B.A. in Theater and Literature) and University of Wisconsin – Madison (Ph.D. in Communication Arts).

Parmesh Shahani holds a Master of Science degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT where he now manages the Convergence Cultures Consortium. He was departmental representative on the Graduate Student Council, an MIT Arts Scholar, and was part of the graduate student advisory group to the MIT Corporation that facilitated the search for the new MIT president in 2003-2004. He was also the organizer of "Between the Lines: Negotiating South Asian LBGT Identity" – Boston's first festival of South Asian queer film, readings and discussions held at MIT in 2004, for which he won the Public Service Center's Community Connection Award for 2003-2004. Shahani holds three undergraduate degrees (Commerce, Education, Film) from India and has had diverse media experiences that include heading a youth-oriented internet web venture, business development for Sony's Indian television channel operations, writing and editing copy for Elle magazine and The Times of India newspaper, helping make a low-budget English feature film and teaching as a visiting faculty member at a Bombay college. His current interests include issues of representation, identity formation, online communities, sexuality, ethnography, youth culture and Bollywood cinema. His personal website is at parmesh.net. Email him at parmesh at mit dot edu.

Ilya Vedrashko is a graduate student at the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. His work focuses on identifying new advertising channels within and outside of the existing media structures and keeps a log of creative outdoor ads. Ilya comes to the department from the Sofia office of Grey Worldwide where he managed accounts for Procter & Gamble, HBO and Wyeth. He also spent a summer at Fallon working as a strategist for its interactive department. Ilya brings five years of professional experience in marketing communications and brand management and holds a BA in business administration and political science from the American University in Bulgaria and an MA in philosophy of virtual culture from Sofia University. His personal website is at vedrashko.com. Email him at ivv at mit dot edu.

Ivan Askwith is a Masters of Science Candidate in the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. A frequent contributor to such publications as Salon.com, Askwith writes on issues at the intersection of media, technology, culture and entertainment, and worked with best-selling author Steven Johnson as a researcher for "Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter" (2005). Askwith has worked as a freelance designer and consultant for almost a decade, and holds a BA in Technology and Media Culture from NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Email him at iaskwith at mit dot edu.

Alec Austin is a Masters of Science Candidate in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. His work focuses on how commercial concerns, ads, and product placement affect the content of (and audience reactions to) TV, movies, and new media such as videogames and weblogs. Alec's critical work has been published in a variety of venues, including The New York Review of Science Fiction, Strangehorizons.com, and Savantmag.com, the last of which he co-founded. He holds a BA in Mathematics from Reed College, and has written three novels. Email him at acaustin at mit dot edu.

Sam Ford is a Masters of Science Candidate in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. He received a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Western Kentucky University in May 2005, majoring in English (writing), news/editorial journalism, mass communication and communication studies, with a minor in film studies. He has published and presented essays on several aspects of contemporary American culture, including multiple essays on professional wrestling, work on censorship in college news media, and American film. Other interests include soap opera, American television, rural American culture, folk music and journalism. He has spent the past five years working for various news publications in Kentucky. Email him at samford at mit dot edu.

Geoffrey Long is a Masters of Science Candidate in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, where he serves as the department representative to the arts@mit initiative. He comes to Cambridge by way of Ohio, Chicago and Washington, DC, where he served as the Web Producer to the medical best practices research firm The Advisory Board Company. He is also a founding member of the award-winning film troupe Tohubohu, a founding member of the transatlantic software development collective Untyped, the founder of the creative consulting company Dreamsbay, and the editor-in-chief of Inkblots Magazine, an online journal of literature, culture and technology which celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2005. He also serves as an occasional consultant to CollaborationTown, an off-Broadway theater company in NYC, and he organized and emceed the Washington, DC installment of the international storytelling event Fray Day 7 in 2003. He has studied at The College of Wooster, The University of Exeter in England and Kenyon College, where he received his BA in English and Philosophy with concentrations in Creative Writing and IPHS in 2000. His current research at MIT examines new forms of commercial narrative entertainment, digital art and transmedia storytelling. His writing has appeared in Polaris, Gothik, Hika and {fray}, and his own storytelling can be found on the iTunes store. His personal site/portfolio is available at geoffreylong.com. Email him at glong at mit dot edu.
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