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Tara McPherson is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Studies in USC’s School of Cinema-TV, where she teaches courses in television, new media, and contemporary popular culture. She is also Chair of the Critical Studies Division. Before arriving at USC, Tara taught film and media studies at MIT. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including
Camera Obscura,
The Velvet Light Trap,
Discourse, and
Screen, and in edited anthologies such as
Race and Cyberspace,
The New Media Handbook,
Virtual Publics and
Basketball Jones. Her
Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South was recently published by Duke UP, as was the anthology
Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (co-edited with Henry Jenkins and Jane Shattuc). She is currently co-editing several anthologies on new technology, working on a book manuscript on racial epistemologies in the electronic age, and launching a dynamic new electronic journal through USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. Co-organizer of the 1999 conference, Interactive Frictions, Tara is among the founding organizers of Race in Digital Space, a multi-year project that has included conferences and art exhibits in both April 2001 and Fall 2002. The initiative is supported by the Annenberg Center for Communication and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. Her new media research focuses on issues of convergence, race, and representation, and she is also exploring the film, television and multimedia work of Charles and Ray Eames.
