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Tara McPherson

Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of Gender and Critical Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. She is the author of the award-winning Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke UP: 2003); co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Duke UP: 2003); and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, part of the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008.) Her writing has appeared in numerous journals and collections. The anthology, Interactive Frictions, co-edited with Marsha Kinder, is forthcoming from the University of California Press, and she is currently working on a manuscript on the cultural and racial logics of code. Her new media research focuses on issues of convergence, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.

She is the Founding Editor of Vectors, www.vectorsjournal.org, a multimedia peer-reviewed journal, and is one of three editors for the new MacArthur-supported International Journal of Learning and Media (MIT Press.) Tara’s work in digital media has been funded by the Annenberg Center for Communication, the MacArthur, Mellon, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is on the advisory board of the Mellon-funded Scholarly Communications Institute, has frequently served as an AFI juror, is a core board member of HASTAC , and is on the boards of several journals.

For over a decade, she has been closely involved with USC’s innovative Institute for Multimedia Literacy. She began teaching courses affiliated with the program in the late 1990s, and this experience proved transformative for both her teaching and her scholarship. While I have long been interested in incorporating digital literacy into my classes (i.e., in helping students author in many media), I am now increasingly committed to exploring how we might facilitate our students becoming more engaged and active learners and to closing the loop between learning in and out of the classroom. As a CET Fellow, my goal is to share what I have learned about digital pedagogy and scholarship with our campus community.