The field of media studies takes many different forms in different intellectual contexts. What if we could start from scratch? What is the footprint of media studies within the academy, and what is its place in the world? American scholar Lisa Gitelman, the featured speaker for the fourth annual Peter Morris Memorial Lecture, explores “the field of media studies as/and the future of the humanities” in her talk “Media Studies from Scratch.”
Gitelman will deliver the Peter Morris Memorial Lecture on Jan. 14, from 3 to 4:30pm in the Sandra Faire & Ivan Fecan Theatre with a reception to follow in the Martin Family Lounge, 219 Accolade East Building. Admission to this event is free and all are welcome to attend.
Gitelman is a media historian and professor of English and Media Studies at New York University (NYU). Her research concerns American book history, techniques of inscription, and the new media of yesterday and today. She is particularly concerned with tracing the patterns according to which new media become meaningful within and against the contexts of older media.
Her most recent publication is Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Duke University Press, 2014). Her other books include Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT 2006) and the edited collection “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron (MIT 2013).
Gitelman holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and is a former editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. She has taught in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, and helped create the Department of Media Studies at Catholic University. She currently chairs NYU’s Department of Media, Culture and Communication.
Based in the Department of Film in the Faculty of Fine Arts at York University, the annual Peter Morris Memorial Lecture features internationally recognized scholars working in the area of cinema and media studies, with a particular emphasis on histories of screen cultures. Previous presenters in the series have been Ian Christie (October 2011), David Bordwell (October 2012) and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (January 2014).