(back row, L-R)
Sally Jackson, Department of Communication
Safiya Noble, Department of African-American Studies
Anita Chan, Media and Cinema Studies Program / ICR
(front row, L-R)
Ned O’Gorman, Department of Communication
Prita Meier, School of Art and Design
Kevin Hamilton, School of Art and Design
(not pictured) Terri Weissman, School of Art and Design
Kevin Hamilton
Associate Professor & Project Leader
New Media Program, School of Art and Design
Other Affiliations:
Media and Cinema Studies Program / ICR, ACDIS, Center for People & Infrastructures, Center for Advanced Study
Kevin Hamilton (www.complexfields.org) works as an artist and researcher in multiple disciplinary contexts. Long-term collaborative projects include historical and theoretical work on the history of interface representations in mediated violence, with a special emphasis on government-produced films related to nuclear weapons development. This research also includes the creation of experimental interactive works for accessing deep multimedia archives. Recognition for his work has included grants from the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, presentation at conferences across Europe and North America (ISEA/ DEAF/CAA/NCA/ACM-SIGCHI), publication in edited journals and anthologies (Routledge/CCCS/Palm Press/UCLA), commissioned public artworks for private and public agencies, and invited residencies (Banff/USC-IML/Bratislava).
Contact: kham@illinois.edu
Anita Chan
Assistant Professor
Media and Cinema Studies Program / ICR
Anita Say Chan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research and teaching interests include globalization and digital cultures, innovation networks and the “periphery”, and science and technology studies in Latin America. Her manuscript on the competing imaginaries of global connection and information technologies in network-age Peru, The Promiscuity of Networks: Digital Universalism and Technological Futures at the Periphery, is forthcoming with MIT Press. Her research has been awarded support from the Center for the Study of Law & Culture at Columbia University’s School of Law and the National Science Foundation, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at The CUNY Graduate Center’s Committee on Globalization & Social Change, and at Stanford University’s Introduction to Humanities Program.
Contact: achan@illinois.edu
Sally Jackson
Professor
Department of Communication
Other Affiliations:
Center for People & Infrastructures
Sally Jackson earned three degrees in Communication from the University of Illinois. She returned to Illinois as a member of the faculty in 2007, concurrent with appointment as the campus Chief Information Officer and Associate Provost, a position she held until 2011. Professor Jackson held prior faculty appointments at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (1979-1982), Michigan State University (1982-1985), Oklahoma University (1985-1990), and the University of Arizona (1991-2007). While at Arizona, she held a series of academic leadership positions, rising to Vice President for Learning and Information Technologies and becoming the university’s first Chief Information Officer.
Contact: sallyj@illinois.edu
Prita Meier
Assistant Professor
Art History, School of Art and Design
Other Affiliations:
Center for African Studies
Assistant Professor Meier (PhD, Harvard University) specializes in African and African Diaspor visual culture, including the arts and building cultures of African Islam and contemporary African art. She has research and teaching interests in the culture of empire and globalism; east African port cities and cultures of exchange; the cultural and aesthetic history of photography in Africa in relation to modern notions of selfhood. She has a book in preparation titled Architecture of the Elsewhere: Swahili Port Cities, Empire and Desire and has publications in African Arts, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Artforum, and Arab Studies Journal, as well as contributions to several exhibition catalogs and edited volumes. She also co-curated African Art and the Shape of Time at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Before coming to UIUC she taught at Wayne State University. She also was a Fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities (2009-2010) and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University (2007-2009).
Contact: spmeier@illinois.edu
Safiya Noble
Assistant Professor
Department of African-American Studies
Other affiliations:
Graduate School for Library and Information Science
Safiya Umoja Noble, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of race, gender and technology in the United States, with a particular focus on representation in digital media platforms. Her research and teaching interests include the political economy of the Internet; critical perspectives on Black women’s representation in technology systems; digital popular culture and the arts; the role of Black labor in technology production, manufacturing, consumption and disposal of information and communication technologies; and the role of digital technology in public life. Safiya earned her Ph.D. in Library & Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an Information in Society Fellow, funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from California State University, Fresno and an M.S. from the University of Illinois. She has published on the political economy of Geographic Information Systems. Her current research, “Searching for Black Girls: Old Traditions in New Media” illumines how technology platforms represent gendered and racialized identities, which she has written about for the public press in Bitch Magazine: Feminist Response to Pop Culture. Safiya regularly blogs on critical perspectives on digital technology culture from a Black feminist perspective and is actively involved in Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC). Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she spent over 15 years in multicultural and urban marketing and advertising.
Contact: snoble@illinois.edu
Ned O’Gorman
Associate Professor
Department of Communication
Other affiliations:
ACDIS, Center for Writing Studies, Center for Advanced Study
Ned O’Gorman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, working at the intersections of the history of rhetoric, rhetorical theory, and political thought, with special interest in the crises and tensions of modernity, especially in the Cold War and in early-modernity. He is the author of Spirits of the Cold War: Contesting Worldviews in the Classical Age of American Security Strategy (2011, Michigan State University Press) and a number of journal essays on topics related to rhetorical theory, aesthetics, religion, political theory, and political history. He is former President of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric, Core Faculty at Illinois in the Program for Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security, and Core Faculty in the Center for Writing Studies.
Contact: nogorman@illinois.edu
Terri Weissman
Assistant Professor
Art History, School of Art and Design
Other affiliations:
Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Terri Weissman, Assistant Professor of Art History, specializes in Modern and Contemporary Art, and the History of Photography. Her book, The Realisms of Berenice Abbott: Documentary Photography and Political Action (UC Press, 2011), examines the politics as well as the successes and failures of Abbott’s realist, communicatively oriented model of documentary photography. She has also co-curated (with Jessica May and Sharon Corwin) a major traveling exhibition titled American Modern: documentary photographs by Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White. The exhibition’s catalog (by UC Press, 2010) further investigates questions of documentary photography’s efficacy and political resonance. She has also published on contemporary artists such as Allan Sekula, Gabriel Orozco and Maria Magdalena Compos Pons, as well as on the cultural impact of disasters such as September 11th. Her work has been supported by the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center, the Smithsonian, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Center for the Study of Modern Art at The Phillips Collection, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
contact: tweissma@illinois.edu