Department of Media Studies

Aniko Bodroghkozy

Aniko Bodroghkozy joined the Media Studies Program and English Department at the University of Virginia in 2001. Prior to coming to Virginia, she taught in the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of Alberta and at Concordia University in Montreal. Between 2003-06 she served as the Interim Director of the Media Studies Program. Beginning in Fall 2007, she will serve as Director of Undergraduate Studies. Prof. Bodroghkozy received her Ph.D. in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin/Madison's Department of Communication Arts where she worked with John Fiske and Lynn Spigel. She received an MFA in Film from Columbia University in New York, and a BA High Honours from the Department of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

Prof. Bodroghkozy's first book, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion was published by Duke University Press in 2001. She is currently completing her second book, tentatively titled, Negotiating Civil Rights in Prime-Time: Television Audiences and the Civil Rights Era. She has published numerous articles on American cinema and television and the social change movements of the postwar era. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Cinema Journal, Screen, Television and New Media, and the online TV Studies journal Flow. Her work has also been frequently reprinted and anthologized in volumes such as Television: The Critical View, Hop on Pop: The Pleasures and Politics of Popular Culture, and Critiquing the Sitcom. She teaches film and television history and historiography, feminist media theory, and Cultural Studies approaches to media analysis. Her courses in the Media Studies Program have included MDST 201: Introduction to Media Studies, MDST 301: Theory and Criticism of Media, MDST/SWAG 331: Women and Television, MDST 361: Film and Television in the 1960s.

Johanna Drucker

Johanna Drucker is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies. She came to the University of Virginia in 1999 to create the Media Studies program of which she was Director from 1999-2003. Her PhD in Ecriture (University of California, Berkeley, 1986) and MA in Visual Studies built on her undergraduate degree in Printing/Printmaking from the California College of Arts and Crafts (1973). She brings a wide range of professional experience and interest in visual studies, fine arts, art history, book history, typography, the history of writing and the alphabet, graphic design, and digital media studies to her teaching and research. She has held faculty positions at Yale University, SUNY Purchase, Columbia University, the University of Texas at Dallas, and Harvard University. Her scholarly publications have been in the field of 20th century art history, visual and concrete poetry, artists' books, and experimental typography, as well as digital aesthetics.

Her scholarly titles include: Theorizing Modernism (Columbia University Press, 1994), The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art (University of Chicago Press, 1994), The Alphabetic Labyrinth (Thames and Hudson, 1995) and The Century of Artists' Books (Granary Books, 1996). She is also internationally known for her work as a book artist and writer and has been publishing experimental editions since 1972; her most recent titles include Figuring the Word (Druckwerk 1998), Narratology (Druckwerk, 1994), and Nova Reperta (in collaboration with Brad Freeman, JABbooks, 1999). Her most recent publication, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, served as the basis of an exhibition at the University Art Museum, Complicit!, in Fall 2006. Her artist book, Testament of Women (2006) was a radical retelling of old testament women's tales. She is currently completing a text book on the history of graphic design with Emily McVarish, to be published by Prentice Hall, and working on the ongoing digital scholarship project, ArtistsBooksOnline.

Professor Drucker's CV can be found here.

David Golumbia

David Golumbia is Assistant Professor in the Media Studies Program and the Department of English. He received his Ph.D. in English in 1999 from the University of Pennsylvania, and also has more than a decade of experience in software development. His teaching and research specializations include digital media, the history and politics of language and textuality, contemporary literature, poststructuralist and postcolonial theory, and the literature of the early colonization of the Americas. He has published many articles on these topics and is currently working on a book titled The Cultural Logic of Computation.

Richard Herskowitz

A nationally renowned film programmer, Richard Herskowitz has been Director of the Virginia Film Festival since 1994. Prior to his recruitment by the University of Virginia, Herskowitz directed the Cornell Cinema program, one of the country's best-known media art centers, for twelve years. As Cornell Cinema director, he programmed nearly 500 films and special programs annually for the nightly exhibition program. He also served as adjunct curator for film and video at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, where he organized art exhibitions by Derek Jarman, Joan Jonas, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, and other artists. Herskowitz has authored film commentary for several academic and general publications (including Wide Angle and Social Text), delivered talks at the Museum of Modern Art and the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center, and edited several exhibition catalogues (including New Performance on Film and Video, Creating Characters and Creatures: The Art of Stan Winston Studio, and Border Crossings: The Cinema of Johan van der Keuken). He recently served as trustee and president of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, a legendary event founded in 1954, which Herskowitz programmed in 1987 at Wells College, 1991 in Riga, Latvia, and 1999 at Duke University. Herskowitz received a Master of Arts in film studies from the University of Wisconsin in 1978 and has taught numerous film courses at U.Va., Cornell, Rutgers, and other universities.

Herskowitz's current projects include consulting on the new film festivals in Durham, North Carolina and Ithaca, New York; serving on the Black Maria Film Festival Jury and maintaining the Film Festival's programming blog.

Richard McGuire

Richard McGuire is an Associate Professor and an Associate Dean for Kent-Dabney-Emmett Association in the College of Arts and Sciences. He teaches in the Media Studies Program and the Department of Sociology. He earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the State University of New York at Buffalo and he was a tenured member of the faculty at the State University of New York College at Brockport, where he taught philosophy courses and served as Director of Interdisciplinary Humanities. He has held National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and in Philosophy at Boston University. Since 1983, he has taught courses at the University of Virginia in the Political and Social Thought Programs, the Department of Rhetoric and Communications Studies, and the Department of Sociology, as well as the Media Studies Program. He has also served as Director of Academic Affairs for Intercollegiate Athletics.

Andrea Press

Andrea Press is Chair of the Media Studies Department and Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, and is the Executive Director of the Virginia Film Festival. She came to the University of Virginia in 2006 to shepherd the Media Studies Program to departmental status and to begin its graduate program. Her last appointment was at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, where she directed the Media Studies Program for nine years, was one of the producers of the Roger Ebert Festival of Overlooked Films, received the Arnold O. Beckman award for excellence in research, and was the recipient of a faculty fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the year before she left. Her M.A. and Ph.D. are in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and her B.A is in sociology and anthropology from Bryn Mawr College. She has a wide range of interdisciplinary interests spanning the social sciences and the humanities which comprise Media Studies. Prior to coming to the University of Virginia, Professor Press has held faculty positions at the University of California at Davis, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, and the London School of Economics in departments as diverse as communications, sociology, writing studies, social psychology, and women's studies. She held an NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Medical College of the University of Kentucky, was scholar-in-residence at the Stanhope Center for Communications Policy Research, and is the recipient of several grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Danforth Foundation, and Soroptimist International.

Professor Press is internationally known for her interdisciplinary scholarship on the media audience, on feminist media issues, and on media and social class in the U.S. She is the author of Women Watching Television: Gender, Class, and Generation in the American Television Experience (University of Pennsylvania Press), the co-author (with Elizabeth Cole) of Speaking of Abortion: Television and Authority in the Lives of Women (University of Chicago Press), and the co-author (with Bruce A. Williams) of the forthcoming What's Important About Media Studies? (Blackwell). For the past ten years she has co-edited the journal The Communication Review with Bruce A. Williams. She has also edited book series in feminist media studies for the University of Pennsylvania Press and the University of Illinois press. Professor Press is known for pioneering the use of qualitative research methods to study the cultural impact of the media in the U.S., and for innovative work on media "impact," specifically vis-a-vis women and members of different social classes. Professor Press has published numerous essays, articles, and chapters on feminist media theory, social class and the media, and media audiences. Her new projects concern media culture among fundamentalist political activists in the U.S., the use of new media in American political culture, and the ongoing analysis of the cultural impact of media on women and girls in U.S. culture.

Director Press' CV can be found here.

Siva Vaidhyanathan

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a cultural historian and media scholar, is the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004). His most recent book is the edited (with Carolyn de la Pena) collection, Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

Vaidhyanathan has written for many periodicals, including American Scholar, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, MSNBC.COM, Salon.com, openDemocracy.net, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Nation. After five years as a professional journalist, Vaidhyanathan earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison , Columbia University, New York University, and now is an associate professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia and a fellow at both the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the Future of the Book. He lives in Charlottesville, VA.

Bruce Williams

Bruce A. Williams received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota and has taught at the Pennsylvania State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, and the London School of Economics. His current research interest focus on the role of a changing media environment in shaping citizenship in the United States. He has received funding for this research from the National Science Foundation and the Cultures of Consumption Research Programme, at Birkbeck College, University of London.

He has published three books and more than forty scholarly journal articles and book chapters. His book Democracy, Dialogue, and Environmental Disputes: The Contested Languages of Social Regulation (with Albert Matheny), published by Yale University Press won the Caldwell Prize as best book for 1996 from the Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics section of the American Political Science Association. His textbook The Play of Power: An Introduction to American Politics (with James Eisenstein, Mark Kessler, and Jacqueline Switzer), St. Martin's Press, 1996 was selected by the Women's Caucus of the American Political Science Association in 1997 as the political science text published in the previous 3 years that best deals with women's issues and diversity. He is the editor (with Andrea Press) of The Communication Review.

He is currently completing two books: And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Eroding Boundaries Between News and Entertainment and What They Mean for Mediated Politics in The 21st Century (with Michael X. Delli Carpini) and Media Studies In The New Media Environment: An Introduction For Students And Citizens (with Andrea Press).