An International Conference
October 8-10, 1999
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Speakers and Moderators  A - I   [J - Z]


Harold (Hal) Abelson is Class of 1922 Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. In 1992, Abelson was designated as one of MIT's six inaugural MacVicar Faculty Fellows in recognition of his contributions to teaching and undergraduate education. He has also received the Bose Award (MIT's School of Engineering teaching award). His book Turtle Geometry (1981) written with Andrea diSessa, presented a computational approach to geometry that has been cited as "the first step in a revolutionary change in the entire teaching/learning process." He is also co-author, with Gerald Sussman and Julie Sussman, of the influential text book, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1984).
 

Edith Ackermann is a Visiting Professor at the MIT School of Architecture and a consultant for various research and teaching institutions.  She is interested in collaborative learning, constructive play, and creative work in computer-mediated environments. She focuses on how virtual and physical spaces support people's learning, and how senses of identity and community change as people meet in virtual worlds. She has pursued these interests in working with technologists, students, teachers, and researchers in milieux concerned with learning and education. Previously, she was a faculty member at the MIT Media Laboratory, at the University of Aix- Marseille, France and at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She was a student and long time collaborator of Jean Piaget at the Centre International d'Epistemology Genetique, Geneva, Switzerland. 
 

Philip Agre is an Associate Professor of Information Studies at UCLA. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 1989, having conducted dissertation research in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory on computational models of improvised activities. He taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Sussex, and UC San Diego before arriving at UCLA in 1998. He is the author of Computation and Human Experience, and the coeditor of Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape (with Marc Rotenberg), Reinventing Technology, Rediscovering Community: Critical Studies in Computing as a Social Practice (with Douglas Schuler), and Computational Theories of Interaction and Agency (with Stanley J. Rosenschein). In addition, he edits an Internet mailing list called the Red Rock Eater News Service that distributes useful information on the social and political aspects of networking and computing to 4000 people in 60 countries.
 

Penelope Alfrey is a barrister and art history graduate of Edinburgh University. She has extensive experience as a textile conservator and has taught in the Contextual and Historical Studies Department at Loughborough University for the past 15 years. Since her call to the English Bar in 1995, she has contributed to a comparative research programme examining the management of intellectual property within higher education. Her current research interests include the relationship of copyright law to studio and professional practices in art and design.  
 

Stephen Ansolabehere is Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT. He is the coauthor of The Media Game: American Politics in the Television Age (with Shanto Iyengar) (1993) and author of Going Negative: How Attack Ads Shrink and Polarize the Electorate. His current research examines the effects of campaign finance practices on elections and representation in the United States.  
 

Luis Arata is Chairperson of the Department of Fine Arts, Languages and Philosophy at Quinnipiac College in Hamden, Connecticut. He has written on theatre, film, and cultural issues. He has been awarded a Visiting Faculty Fellowship at Yale University's Digital Media Center for the Arts. Arata is currently developing an Interactive Arts program for his Department. 
 

Constance Balides is Assistant Professor of Communications at Tulane University.
 

Stephanie Barish has worked as Producer and Creative Director at Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation since 1994. Over the last three years, she produced and directed Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust, a comprehensive CD-ROM that interweaves the video testimony of four Holocaust survivors from the Shoah Foundation's Archive within a broad historic and geographic context. This CD-ROM is currently entering worldwide distribution, and will be used to teach history as well as promote lessons of tolerance.

Her previous accomplishments include designing and implementing the Shoah Foundation's acclaimed research interface and its award-winning web site. More recently, she worked with the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York as Art Director for a permanent exhibition of computer-generated artworks. She also supervised graphics imaging and designed the titles for the 1998 Academy Award-winning documentary, The Last Days.

Her technical background is in feature-film animation and special effects. She earned two Masters degrees from the University of Southern California, in Film Production (Computer-Generated Imagery) and Social Science. She has been a lecturer at the University of Southern California on the ethics and study of women and men in society and at San Francisco State University on film theory. 

 

Priscilla Barlow is a candidate for the Ph.D. in the English Department at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, Best Sellers to Blockbusters: Film and the Popular Novel from 1910 to 1927, explores the increasingly intertextual nature of film adaptation during the silent film period, and examines the role played by other media such as popular magazines in creating the expectations of the cinematic spectator. 
 

Edward Barrett is Senior Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT. He is general editor of the MIT Press series on Digital Communication, co-director for the MIT Writing Initiative, and Director of the Undergraduate Technical Writing Cooperative. He has edited the MIT Press books Text, ConText, and HyperText (1988), The Society of Text (1989), Sociomedia (1992), Contextual Media (with Marie Redmond) (1995), and Xcommunication: A poetics of Cyberspace (1997). He also co-authored the Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing with Les Perelman and James Paradis. 
 

Charles Bazerman is a Professor of English and Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and also currently a Knight Distinguished Visiting Scholar of Writing at Cornell University. He is interested in the social dynamics of writing, rhetorical theory, and the rhetoric of knowledge production and use. His most recent book is The Languages of Edison's Light, just published by MIT Press. Bazerman's current projects include a rhetorical theory of literate action and an investigation of environmental information. 
 

Jon Bekken is Assistant Professor of Journalism at Suffolk University. He has published articles and book chapters on the history of the labor press, newsboy unions, the professionalization of newsworkers,  and the political economy of the bookselling industry. He is currently working on a book about the history of journalism in Chicago. 
 

Wendy Bellion is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Northwestern University. Her dissertation, Likeness and Deception in Early American Art, examines the production of trompe l'oeil paintings in federal Philadelphia and explores related issues of resemblance and dissemblance in early national art and culture. She currently holds a 1999-2001 Wyeth Fellowship at the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. 
 

Daniel Bernardi is Assistant Professor of New Media in the Department of Media Arts at the University of Arizona and the author of Star Trek and History: Race-ing Toward a White Future
 

William Boddy is a professor at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics and has published on media history in Screen, Cinema Journal, "Media, Culture and Society, and the International Journal of Cultural Studies as well as in numerous anthologies. 
 

Jay David Bolter is Wesley Professor of New Media and Director of the Center for New Media Research and Education in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Tech.  His most recent book, Remediation: Understanding New Media (co-author Richard Grusin), focuses on the ways in which new media refashion or "remediate" older visual and verbal forms -- for example, how the World Wide Web refashions graphic design, printing, radio, film and television. His earlier publications include Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age and Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. He is also co-author with Michael Joyce of Storyspace, a hypertextual computer program. 
 

Ron Burnett is President of the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, former Director of the Graduate Program in Communications at McGill University and the author of Cultures of Vision: Images, Media and the Imaginary. His forthcoming book is entitled, Inside the Digital Mind: How Images Think. He is currently working on the development of second generation software for learning over the Web. 
 

James Buzard is Associate Professor of Literature at MIT and the author of The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to 'Culture,' 1800-1918 (1993), as well as essays on various aspects of 19th and 20th-century British literature and culture. His current book project is Anywhere's Nowhere: Fictions of Autoethnography in the United Kingdom
 

James Cain received his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and his A.B. from Princeton. He currently teaches Ancient and Medieval Literature at MIT with a particular interest in Gender and Sexuality Studies. 
 

John Campbell is a graduate student in and webmaster for the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His primary  interests concern embodied identity online, the exploration of sexuality in virtual space, and the integration of emerging media technologies into daily life. 
 

Rod Carveth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Emerson College. He is a co-author of Media Economics: Theory and Practice and the forthcoming Meta-Analyses of Media Effects. His current research examines the social impact of access to online communication technology. 
 

James Castonguay is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT. He has published several articles on war and the media, and is a contributor to American Quarterly's Project for Hypertext Scholarship in American Studies. He is also the Webmaster and Information Technology Officer for the Society for Cinema Studies. 
 

Arthur Chandler is a Professor at San Francisco State University, where he teaches courses on the culture of cities and classes on digital culture and design. He is one of the founding wizards of BayMOO, an all-text virtual reality environment on the Internet. He is the author of six books, and has published in journals as Contemporary French Civilization and Wired. He won the Fels Award for Non-Fiction with his essay, "The Faustian Infinite: Western Mathematics and the Humanities of Endless Space." 
 

Kelly Cole is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is conducting research on the regulation of medical advertising on radio, television and the Internet. 
 

Roderick Coover teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago in the Departments of Art History, Liberal Arts and Video. His recent works include Harvest 2000, Visualizing Cultures, On Ghanaian Performance, Penelope, and Casting Antigone.
 

Tom Cragin received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1996 and is Chair of History at Widener University. He has published articles on the French popular press. He is working on a book, Murder in Parisian Streets about the representation of crime and justice in the popular press of 19th-century Paris.
 

Margaret Crane and Jon Winet's visual art collaboration engages the language and images of the information age in American life over the past fifteen years. They are currently working on Democracy - The Last Campaign (D-TLC). This yearlong, national inter-media project focuses on the 2000 elections and includes exhibitions, public programs and forums, publications and an interactive electronic forum on the Web. This fall Winet is a Visiting Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Crane teaches and writes about visual arts and technology. 
 

Ellen W. Crocker is Lecturer in German at MIT and has been actively involved in the development of the curriculum for beginning and intermediate German courses. Before coming to MIT, she taught English as a Foreign Language in Mannheim, Germany, Northeastern University and the Harvard Summer School. She is the author of the interactive CD-Rom In der Niederlausitz and co-director of Berliner sehen, a hypermedia project for the study of German language and culture. 
 

Sharon Cumberland is an Assistant Professor of Poetry and American Literature at Seattle University. She is working on a book about African American slave narratives, as well as articles on Hispanic stereotypes in American film and on fan writing on the Internet. Her most recent article, in Links and Letters, is "North American Desire for the Spanish Other: Three Film Versions of Blasco-Ibaoez' Blood and Sand." 
 

Mary Ellen Curtin is the science & technology reviewer for Amazon.com. She is one of the organizers of the Foresmutters Project, an anarchic effort to put material from the earliest days of slash on-line. She holds an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a Master's from the University of Pennsylvania, both in population biology. She is working on a book about fan fiction.
 

Robert Darnton is Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of European History at Princeton where he has taught since 1968. A MacArthur Prize fellow, he is the current president of The American Historical Association. His books include Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment (1968), The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie (1979), The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1983), The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984), The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (1989), and The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France (1995). At present he is working on information systems and the media in eighteenth-century Paris.
 

Ashley Dawson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He teaches cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and contemporary literature. He is completing a book on geographies of identity among diasporic groups in postimperial Britain. 
 

Brenda Dervin is Professor of Communication at Ohio State University. Her recent publications include articles on information and democracy and alternative communication practice in the Journal of Communication and Journal of American Society for Information Science. She is past president of the International Communication Association and member of the International Council of the International Association for Media and Communication Research. nbsp;
 

Wendy Dibean is a Master of Arts student at the University of Miami where she also works as the University Webmaster. Her research centers on  the World Wide Web as an information medium. 
 

Peter Donaldson is a Professor and Section Head for Literature and Director of Shakespeare Electronic Archive at MIT. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, his research interests include Shakespeare on film, theory and practice of digital archives, electronic pedagogy, and Renaissance intellectual history. He is the author of Machiavelli and Mystery of the State (1988) and Shakespearean Film/Shakespearean Directors (1990). 
 

Joseph Dumit is an anthropologist and cultural theorist of science and technology. He is an assistant professor in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT. 
 

Greg Elmer is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published a number of essays on profiling technologies, the politics of cyberspace and global cultural production. Recent articles have appeared in Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Continuum and Quebec Studies. He is currently editing a special issue of Space and Culture on the topic of "archives" and is also writing a book on the discriminatory applications of computer profiling.
 

Steve Elworth has taught at Mercy College and LaGuardia Community College. He has lectured widely and published on film and soundtrack issues, film music, film and ideology, narrative theory, genre study, masculinity, Avant-Garde film and popular music studies. He is completing a dissertation at New York University.
 

Paul Erickson, a native of Minneapolis, graduated with a B.A. in English from the University of Chicago in 1992. He is a doctoral candidate in American Civilization at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is writing a dissertation on the cultural work of sensational urban fiction in ante-bellum America. He is currently a Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. 
 

Virginia Eubanks studies the mythology of technoscience in the department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She wades out of academe every once in a while to do computer-mediated performance, publish strange little art books, and write for Salon and Art Attack! magazines. In a past life, she published Brillo magazine.
 

Anna Everett is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of several articles, the editor of Screening Noir, the online newsletter of the Black Caucus of the Society for Cinema Studies, and author of two forthcoming books, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 and Digital Diasporas: A Race for Cyberspace
 

Kurt Fendt is Research Associate in Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT and a specialist in hypertext theory and multimedia applications for the humanities. He is co-director of Berliner sehen, a collaborative hypermedia environment for the study of German culture and language. He formerly held the position of Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Bern in Switzerland, where he received his Ph.D. in Modern German Literature. 
 

Michael Fischer is a Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies and Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and was the Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at Rice University. His research focuses on social change in the Caribbean, the Middle East, South Asia, and the United States. He is a major contributor to debates in anthropological theory and cultural studies, as well as to Middle East studies. He is author of Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution, Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition (with Mehdi Abedi), and Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (with George Marcus).  
 

Mary Flanagan is a multimedia producer, professor, and maker of personal digital work. Currently, she is Assistant Professor of Digital Arts in the Department of Media Study at State University of New York at Buffalo, where she teaches courses in animation, cyberculture, interactive media, gender and technology, and sound design. At Buffalo she is also producing an online educational game for girls ages 9-11.
 

Suzanne Flynn holds a joint appointment at MIT in Linguistics and in Foreign Languages and Literatures, where she is Section Head. She has directed the English as a Second Language Program for many years and is widely recognized as a pioneer in the field of second-language acquisition. 
 

Oz Frankel is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a member of the Michigan Society of Fellows. His recently completed dissertation at UC, Berkeley, was titled States of Inquiry: The Politics, Rituals and Texts of Social Investigations in 19th Century Britain and the US.
 

Anne Friedberg is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern and has co-edited an anthology of critical and theoretical writing about film, Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism. Her current book project, The Virtual Window, situates the convergence cinema, television and the computer screen within a cultural history of the window as an architectural and figurative trope. 
 

Maureen Furniss, Ph.D., is Founding Editor and Publisher of Animation Journal (1992 to present), the only peer reviewed scholarly journal devoted to animation history and theory. She is also Program Director and Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California. Her first book, Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics, was published in 1998; she is now editing an anthology on the United Productions of America animation studio and working as a content advisor for a series of television programs on animation history. 
 

Gilberte Furstenberg has been teaching French at MIT for the last fifteen years. In her courses, she makes use of print and video materials in order to integrate culture into the language curriculum. She is the author of A la rencontre de Philippe, a pioneering interactive multimedia program published by Yale University Press, and she is now completing an interactive multimedia documentary, Dans un quartier de Paris
 

Elaine Debenedictis Gallagher is the Director of the Art History program at Canisius College.
 

Ursula Ganz-Blaettler is a film and television critic who teaches film history and communication studies in Zurich and Geneva. Her current work includes the analysis of fictional programs on Swiss television and studies of the accumulation / diffusion of knowledge as "cultural capital." A study of time-structure in American and German television drama is in the making, focusing on flashbacks and "history" as a narrative device. 
 

Paula Gardner specializes in feminist media studies and critical/cultural analyses of psychiatric discourses. She has worked as a mental health and rape crisis counselor, an international human rights advocate and in a collaborative television production on mental health and stigma. She is currently completing her dissertation on the implications of depression discourses and new mental health information technologies for democratic citizenship.
 

Bruce Garrison is a Professor of Journalism in the School of Communication at the University of Miami. He conducts research about journalists and their use of computers in gathering and in distributing information. How journalists use the World Wide Web and other Internet tools are among his research interests. He is author of nine books, including two books about computers in newsroom and a series of books about news reporting, feature writing, and other forms of journalism. He contributes regularly to numerous journals in journalism and mass communication and serves on the editorial board of several journals.
 

Lisa Gitelman is Assistant Professor of English and Media Studies at Catholic University. Her book, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era will be published in November by Stanford University Press. 
 

Shari Goldin is a teaching assistant and senior writer with the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. She is also a doctoral student at University of Wisconsin-Madison in the department of Communication Arts and is completing her Ph.D. Her dissertation, tentatively titled Patriotic Lessons: Radio, Childhood, and the Technological Imagination, is a social history of children and radio from the 1920s throught the 1940s. She has published essays and interviews in The Children's Culture Reader and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat
 

Alison Griffiths is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech at Baruch College, City University of New York where she teaches media studies and documentary film and television. Her doctoral thesis on the origins of ethnographic film won the 1999 Society for Cinema Studies dissertation award and will be published by Columbia University Press. Her work has appeared in such journals as Wide Angle, Visual Anthropology Review, Film History and in numerous anthologies. 
 

Hugh Gusterson is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science Studies at MIT. His research focuses on the political culture of nuclear weapons scientists and antinuclear activists in the U.S. and former Soviet Union. He is also interested in the contemporary biotech industry and in psychopharmacology. He is the author of Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (1996) and is finishing a second book about the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories after the cold war.  
 

Alex Halavais is a doctoral student in Department of Communications and the Interdisciplinary Program in Global Trade, Transportation, and Logistics at the University of Washington. His research examines the relationship of social structure to innovation and the impact of communications technologies on processes of innovation and social change. 
 

Joe Haldeman is currently Adjunct Professor at MIT where he teaches a science fiction writing workshop and a literature course in modern science fiction. He is the author of the The Forever War which won the Hugo, Nebula, and Ditmar Awards as Best Science Fiction Novel of 1975,The Hemingway Hoay which won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella of 1990, and Forever Peace which won the novel Hugo in 1998.  
 

Mary Beth Haralovich is Head of Media Studies at the University of Arizona. She is one of the founders of the Console-ing Passions:Television, Video, and Feminism Conference. She has published widely in the areas of film and television history.
 

Liam Harte teaches at Westfield State College in Massachusetts and is completing his Ph.D. dissertation at Loyola University, Chicago, on John Rawls' political theory. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Ulster at Coleraine; and an MPhil in Moral Philosophy from the University of St. Andrews. He writes that he is possibly the only philosopher whose academic work has been mentioned in both The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly . He earned this distinction for his paper "'Whaddya Say, Cosmo?' 'Everything, My Man!' A Freudo-Rousseauean Perspective on Seinfeld's Kramer."
 

John Hartley is Director of the Tom Hopkinson Centre for Media Research, and Research Professor in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. His most recent books are Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture and Uses of Television. In 1998 he was visiting professor at NYU and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Beijing University. In January 2000 he takes up the post of Dean of Arts, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. 
 

James Hay is an Associate Professor in the Department of Speech Communication's Graduate Program in Cultural Studies at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. He is currently a Fellow at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, finishing a book about "neo-liberalism" and media as technologies of governing social space in the U.S. 
 

Mary Hopper is Postdoctoral Associate in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and Managing Editor of the Media in Transition Project. Before her current position, she also served as Visiting Scientist for two years at the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives at MIT. She received her Ph.D. from Purdue University in Educational Computing and Instructional Design.
 

Robert Huesca is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Trinity University in San Antonio. His research centers on alternative media, Internet journalism, and the uses of communication for social change. He has  published in the Journal of Communication, Media, Culture & Society, Gazette, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture and other books and journals. He is currently the regional editor for Latin America for Communication Booknotes Quarterly
 

Fran Ilich is the director of Cinematik, the first cyberculture festival in Latin America. He is the author of a novel, Metro-Pop, a screenplay, Interaccion (Discovery Channel), and director of two short films, Ich Bin Eva (Berlin, 1999) and Una Ciudad Sin Estilo (1994), which was shown as part of Amsterdam's Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis film collection. He currently writes Modem.txt a weekly column for assorted Spanish media.

[Speakers J - Z]

media in transition    agenda    summaries    papers    dialogue