News/Research

Announcing the 2014-2015 Season of the History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series

03 Sep, 2014

Announcing the 2014-2015 Season of the History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series

The UC Berkeley Center for New Media is pleased to present the 2014-2015 Season of:

The History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series brings to campus leading humanities scholars working on issues of media transition and technological emergence. The series promotes new, interdisciplinary approaches to questions about the uses, meanings, causes, and effects of rapid or dramatic shifts in techno-infrastructure, information management, and forms of mediated expression.

“Cloud Policy”
with Jennifer Holt, UC Santa Barbara
Thursday, October 2, 2014 | 5:00 PM — 6:30 PM |Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Holt is a professor of Film and Media Studies, specializing in media industry studies, policy and regulation, and media history. Her research looks at digital distribution and policies related to cloud storage and digital media infrastructure. Her works have been published in Cinema Journal, Quality Popular Television, and Moving Data among other journals. She has authored Empires of Entertainment (2011), which examines the deregulation and media conglomeration of the 80s and 90s. She is the Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center's Media Industries Project and a founding member of the editorial collective for the Media Industries journal.

“Cold War Multimedia”
with Fred Turner, Stanford University
Thursday, November 13, 2014 | 5:00 PM — 6:30 PM |BCNM Commons, 340 Moffitt

Turner is a professor in the Department of Communication and Director of Stanford’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. Before coming to Stanford, he taught Communication at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist. He has written for newspapers and magazines ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine to Nature. He has authored: The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (2014); From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006); and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (1996).

“Gamic Orientalism”
with Chris Goto-Jones, Leiden University
Tuesday, December 2, 2014 | 5:00 PM — 6:30 PM | 370 Dwinelle Hall

Goto-Jones became Chair Professor of Modern Japan Studies in Leiden in 2006 and is one of the founders of its Modern East Asia Research Centre. In 2009 he was appointed to the new chair in Comparative Philosophy & Political Thought and the founding dean of Leiden University College, The Hague. He is a professorial research associate at the Japan Research Centre, SOAS (London University) and the White Rose National Centre of Excellence (Leeds/Sheffield Universities). He Beyond Utopia: New Politics, the Politics of Knowledge, and the Science Fictional Field of Japan which explores the ways in which non-conventional spaces (the non-European and the non-textual – in this case Japan and digital/visual culture) can make creative and innovative contributions to political thought more widely. More broadly his works focus on the ideas and practice of philosophy dislocated from its conventional disciplinary roots in Europe, focusing on modern East Asian political and ethical thought.

“Intermedia Dance”
with Elizabeth Freeman, UC Davis
Thursday, February 19, 2014 | 5:00 PM — 6:30 PM | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Credit: Lisa Baetz

Freeman taught at Sarah Lawrence College before coming to UC Davis in 2000. She specializes in American literature and gender/sexuality/queer studies, and her articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals. She has written two books: The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (2002), and Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010). Her research explores queer identities, history, politics, and cultural shifts through the lens of art and media. She was also the editor of a special issue of GLQ, "Queer Temporalities" (2007). She now serves as Editor of GLQ, with Professor of History Nayan Shah at UCSD.

“Against the Cultural Singularity”
with Alan Liu, UC Santa Barbara
Thursday, March 5, 2015 | 5:00 PM — 6:30 PM | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall
(co-sponsored with the Department of Rhetoric)

Alan Liu is a professor and former department Chair of the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an affiliated faculty member of UCSB’s Media Arts & Technology graduate program. Previously, he served as faculty at Yale University’s English Department and British Studies Program. He began his research in the field of British romantic literature and art, moving in the 1990s to cultural criticism and postmodernism, now focusing on the digital humanities and the relationship between media and history. Liu founded the Teaching with Technology project at UC Santa Barbara called Transcriptions: Literature and the Culture of Information and the undergraduate specialization on Literature and the Culture of Information. During 2002-2007 he was a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) and chair of the Technology/Software Committee of the ELO’s PAD Initiative (Preservation / Archiving / Dissemination of Electronic Literature). 2005-2010 he led the Transliteracies: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading. His first book, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (1989), explored the relation between the imaginative experiences of literature and history. His more recent works include Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (2008)

“System Addict”
with Alexander Weheliye, Northwestern University
Thursday, April 2, 2014 | 5:00 PM — 6:30 PM | 370 Dwinelle Hall

Alexander Weheliye is a professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, where he teaches black literature and culture, critical theory, social technologies, and popular culture. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, which was awarded the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature or Culture and Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Currently, he is working on two projects. The first, Modernity Hesitant: The Civilizational Diagnostics of W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter Benjamin, tracks the different ways in which these thinkers imagine the marginal as central to the workings of modern civilization. The second, Feenin: R&B’s Technologies of Humanity, offers a critical history of the intimate relationship between R&B music and technology since the late 1970s. His work has been published and is forthcoming in American Literary History, The Black Scholar, boundary 2, Criticism, CR: The New Centennial Review, The Journal of Visual Culture, Public Culture, Small Axe, and Social Text, among others.