Featured Speakers
Jim Brown, Director of the Digital Studies Center and Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University-Camden
Jim Brown is Director of the Digital Studies Center (DiSC) and Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden. He conducts research in the areas of digital rhetoric and ethics, electronic literature, and software studies, and his work has been published in journals such as Amodern, Philosophy & Rhetoric, and Computers and Composition. His book, Ethical Programs, examined the ethical and rhetorical possibilities of a number of networked software platforms, and he has also conducted researched on how digital infrastructures contribute to the problem of online abuse and harassment. His current research addresses federated and distributed network structures both online and offline. Along with Robert Emmons, Jim is co-founder of the Rutgers-Camden Archive of Digital Ephemera (R-CADE), which invites scholars and artists from around the world to do hands-on research and creative activity with digital technologies.
Additional Reading:
Epicrisis for an Epic Crisis
The Machine that therefore I am
Karen Cariani, Executive Director of the GBH Archives and Project Director, American Archive of Public Broadcasting
Karen Cariani is the David O. Ives Executive Director of the GBH Archives and GBH Project Director for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration with the Library of Congress to preserve and provide a centralized on-line access to content created by public media.
Karen has 35+ years of television production, project, and archival management experience and was project director for many projects focused on providing access to digital audiovisual collections online and long-term digital preservation. She served on the AMIA board, Digital Commonwealth board, and the National Stewardship Digital Alliance (NDSA) Coordinating Committee and chaired the Levels of Preservation revision working group. Karen is committed to push new technology to its limits to allow historical cultural materials to become more available for public use. She is active in the archive community and professional organizations and passionate about the use of media archives and digital library collections for education.
Tanya Clement, Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities Associate Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin
Tanya E. Clement is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Her areas of research are modernist, textual, sound, and infrastructure studies as these concerns impact academic research, research libraries, and the creation of research tools and resources in Digital Humanities (DH). She leads High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship (HiPSTAS) for the development and interrogation of socio-technical infrastructures to increase access and scholarship with audiovisual cultural heritage collections, which is currently being funded by a Mellon foundation grant. Her current book project is Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives, out with MIT Press in August 2024. Read more of Tanya’s publications here.
Additional Reading:
Anne Sexton Listening to Anne Sexton
Shannon Cruz, Assistant Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University
Shannon Cruz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at The Pennsylvania State University, where she is also a co-fund of the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences and a member of the faculty in the Intercollege Graduate Degree Program in Ecology. She studies the determinants, processes, and outcomes of social influence, particularly in environmental contexts. More specifically, she is interested in how environmental attitudes are shaped by ideological factors, change dynamically as the result of social interaction in groups and networks, and can be altered by persuasive messages. Her current line of research focuses on conservation and climate change attitudes, examining the structure of these attitudes and how messages can help bridge the ideological divide on these issues. Her research has appeared in outlets such as the Journal of Environmental Psychology, Climatic Change, and Social Influence.
Mike Delayo, PhD Candidate in Communication Arts and Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University
Mike Delayo is a Ph.D. candidate at Penn State in the Communication Arts & Sciences department. Mike primarily studies the rhetoric of popular culture. His research most often focuses on sports and video games, topics reflected in his Master’s thesis titled “‘I Definitely Want to Thank My Psychiatrist’: Digital Mental Health Disclosures in Professional Sports.” More recently, his research has focused on the intersections of rhetoric and advanced data practices in professional sports.
Mike has also been a recurring research assistant to Dr. Eberly on the Le Show archive project. His participation primarily entailed transcribing episodes of Le Show. Most of his attention was paid to episodes from the 21st century, but he occasionally stepped back into earlier decades. Mike also contributed to discussions about what it meant to accurately transcribe Le Show and best practices to do such a thing at a scale that would be beneficial to the archive as a whole.
Rosa A. Eberly, Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University
Rosa Eberly is a free-range rhetorician who studies histories and theories of rhetoric, publics theory, public memory, sound, character, and deliberation. She curated Harry Shearer’s Le Show archive for the Library of Congress / American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Eberly has studied Le Show and, consequently, Shearer’s other work since 2011. Since 1996 Eberly has studied and taught courses on relationships among rhetoric, violence, and public memory with emphasis on violence in educational settings. Additional interests include Isocrates and Theophrastus, free speech and democracy, rhetoric and poetics, sound and aura rhetorics, and theories of identity.
Eberly is author of Towers of Rhetoric: Memory and Reinvention and Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres; co-editor of A Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy and The Sage Handbook of Rhetoric; co-author of The Elements of Reasoning, 2d ed.; and articles on publics theory, proto-public deliberation in rhetoric classrooms, public memory, sound studies, and rhetoric and identity.
Alan Gevinson, Special Assistant to the Chief of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, the Library of Congress
Alan Gevinson, Special Assistant to the Chief of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center at the Library of Congress, is the Library’s project director for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. He received a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University, studied motion picture and television production at NYU’s Institute of Graduate Film & TV, taught in George Mason University’s graduate program in history, and co-authored History Matters: A Student Guide to History Online; Library of Congress Motion Pictures, Broadcasting, Recorded Sound: An Illustrated Guide; and The Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Plan. He is the curator of the Library of Congress exhibitions That’s Showbiz: Hollywood, Hope & Fame and Hope for America: Performers, Politics & Pop Culture, and media curator of The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom. At the American Film Institute, Alan was associate editor of the AFI Catalog of Feature Films, and project director and editor of Within Our Gates: Ethnicity in American Feature Films, 1911- 1960.
Christina Grozinger, Publius Vergilius Maro Professor of Entomology and the Director for the Center for Pollinator Research, The Pennsylvania State University
Christina Grozinger is the Publius Vergilius Maro Professor of Entomology and the Director for the Center for Pollinator Research at Penn State. She is a Fellow of the Entomological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and received the 2021 National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences and 2022 Penn State President’s Award for Excellence in Academic Integration. Christina received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology at McGill University, and her master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. The Penn State Center for Pollinator Research includes members from 9 Colleges across Penn State, and uses an integrative approach – from genes to spatial ecology – to support the health of bee populations.
Joshua Gunn, Professor of Communication Studies, University of Texas at Austin
Joshua Gunn is a Professor of Communication Studies and an affiliate faculty of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. His research and teaching program focuses on the category of the ineffable, and in particular, how people use and abuse signs and symbols to negotiate ineffability. In this context, his attention to sound, music, and human speech are part of a deeper interest in the limits of human representation, self-understanding, and self-fashioning. Gunn is the author of Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the 20th Century (2005), Political Perversion: Rhetorical Aberration in the Time of Trumpeteering (2020), and a public speaking textbook, Speech Craft (2018). He is currently working on a monograph about the use of recorded human speech in various forms of collective mourning.
Read several of Joshua’s works on recording performance, sound studies, canned laughter, and auscultating.
Kevin Howley, Professor of Media Studies, DePauw University
Kevin Howley (PhD, Indiana University) is a professor of media studies at DePauw University. A proud alumnus of the City University of New York (CUNY), he received a BA in Communication Arts & Sciences from Queens College, and an MS in Radio/Television Programming & Management from Brooklyn College. Dr. Howley’s research and teaching interests include participatory culture, multimodal writing, and critical utopianism. Prior to joining academia, he worked in the community media sector as a trainer and producer. Dr. Howley has also worked as a newspaper columnist, radio broadcaster, and video producer. His scholarship has appeared in Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism, Social Movement Studies, and Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture. In addition, Howley is the author and editor of several books including Community Media: People, Places, and Communication Technologies (Cambridge, 2005) Understanding Community Media (Sage, 2010) and Drones: Media Discourse and the Public Imagination (Peter Lang, 2018). More recently, Howley has pursued longstanding interests in creative writing, with flash fiction publications in Quibble, Fauxmoir, and South Florida Poetry Journal. Professor Howley’s latest peer-reviewed article, “Serious Play: Campus Humor in Precarious Times,” appears in the summer 2023 edition of Literature/Film Quarterly. For more information, please visit Dr. Howley’s blog, Constituent Notes.
Additional Reading:
I Had a Drone: Internet Memes and the Politics of Culture
Jennifer Isasi, Assistant Research Professor of Digital Scholarship, The Pennsylvania State University
Dr. Jennifer Isasi is an Assistant Research Professor of Digital Scholarship at The Pennsylvania State University. She is the Assistant Director of the Office of Digital Pedagogies and Initiatives and Director of the Digital Liberal Arts Research Initiative. This position establishes a research methodologies community at PSU to articulate and integrate digital research in projects in the humanities and social sciences and/or to preserve the history of minoritized communities in and around Centre County on digital archives. She also collaborates with the Center for Black Digital Research at PSU Libraries to organize hybrid events and training, assist with Douglass Day and research in general. Jennifer is also the current managing editor of the open access journal Programming Historian en español, with which she has collaborated since 2018. To read more about her work, you can visit her portofolio.
Matt Jordan, Head of the Department of Film Production and Media Studies, The Pennsylvania State University
Matt Jordan is head of the Department of Film Production and Media Studies in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State. He is director of Penn State’s News Literacy Initiative for which he hosts the podcast News Over Noise. He writes and teaches classes about how today’s media systems have been altered by digital technology and what it means for democracy. He is executive producer of the Emmy Nominated documentary series HumIn Focus and author of dozens of articles and books on popular culture in America and Europe. His latest book is Danger Sound Klaxon! The Horn that Changed History.
Mia Ridge, Digital Curator for the Western Heritage Collections, The British Library
Dr. Mia Ridge is the British Library’s Digital Curator for Western Heritage Collections. As part of the Library’s Digital Scholarship team, she helps enable innovative research based on the British Library’s digital collections, offering support, training and guidance on applying computational research methods to historical collections. Part of the Digital Research team, she provides advice and training on computational research, AI / machine learning and crowdsourcing. A Co-Investigator on Living with Machines (2018-23), she co-curated the Living with Machines exhibition with Leeds Museums and Galleries (2022-23).
Current projects involve crowdsourcing the transcription of historical playbills, and experimenting with machine learning-based methods with library collections. In January 2020 she was awarded funding by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for Collective Wisdom, a project that will capture the state of the art in crowdsourcing and digital participation in cultural heritage in 2020-21. You can read more from Mia in her blog. Read her work also in Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data.
Josh Shepperd, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder
Josh Shepperd is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Josh directs two projects that he co-designed for the Library of Congress: the Radio Preservation Task Force and Sound Submissions Project. His book, Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting was released in May, 2023 on the University of Illinois Press. He’s currently working on an update to the “official” history of US public media for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and its trade journal Current, and serves as a founding Associate Editor of Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture for University of California Press.
Additional Reading:
Radio Preservation and the Orphan Agenda: Archival Strategies
Theodor Adorno, Paul Lazarsfeld, and the Public Interest Mandate of Early Communications Research, 1935–1941
Michael Socolow, Professor of Communication and Journalism, University of Maine
Jon Stone, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric Studies, University of Utah
Jonathan Stone studies rhetoric as emergent from and constitutive of the mythologies that accompany notions of technological and cultural advance. His current research is focused on the ongoing impact of the persisting mythos of the American West on contemporary and historical efforts at environmental protections, indigenous sovereignty, and racial justice. He is currently working on two major projects: (1) A co-edited collection with Steph Ceraso theorizing and exploring sensory rhetorics, and (2) a monograph tentatively titled A Sense of Home that engages the interests listed above, also from a sensory perspective.
Jon is also engaged in work that theorizes the rhetorical affordances of sound. He has published work on recorded sound’s influence in historical, cultural, and vernacular contexts, usually as folksongs, but also as popular music, religious podcasts, and radio programs.
Jon’s NEH supported book, Listening to the Lomax Archive was published in 2021 by the University of Michigan Press. The book investigates the careers of John A. Lomax and his son Alan during the Great Depression with focus on field recordings made for and stored by the Library of Congress’s archive at the American Folklife Center. It is available as an open source publication with streaming audio content here.
Additional Reading:
Rhetorical Folkness: Reanimating Walter J. Ong in the Pursuit of Digital Humanity
Kakie Urch, Associate Professor of Multimedia, University of Kentucky
Kakie Urch has built (and run) three radio stations and listened to many more. Also, she did the M&Ms sort for much of Van Halen’s 5150 tour.
She did doctoral work on the canon of delivery, rhetorical production and power at Penn State with Cheryl Glenn, Sharon Crowley and Henry Giroux and was a fellow in multimedia at the UC-Berkeley Knight Center. Her most cited academic work is on the concept of the possibility of flaneuserie in the “em space” of Modernism.
She has been an editor and special projects producer for Knight Ridder, Gannett and Scripps-Howard holdings in Cincinnati, Palm Springs, Lexington, Ky., Des Moines and State College, Pa. She worked preproduction and placement for Jaffe Entertainment LA on Terminator Salvation (McG), Seven Pounds (Will Smith), The Miracle at Santa Anna (Spike Lee), 30 on 30 Kobe Bryant (Spike Lee), Soul Men (Malcolm Lee), The Comebacks (Tom Brady) and The Longshots (Fred Durst).
Her most recent work is the “One Night Stand” music docu-series by Leslie Lyons airing as a Qwest Original on Quincy Jones’ Qwest TV on Roku and OTT in 144 countries. (Seun Kuti/Kojo Melche Roney; David Amram/Cheyenne Mize).
She is a tenured associate professor of multimedia in the School of Journalism and Media in the College of Communication and Information at the University of Kentucky, an ACEJMC-accredited, Hearst Competition Top 10 program. She is the faculty advisor to WRFL-FM student-run radio and the Bluegrass Student Chapter.
Her students have won Emmys, Pulitzers and Miss USA.
Cheyenne Zaremba, PhD Student in Communication Arts and Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University
Cheyenne Zaremba is a PhD student at Penn State in the Communication Arts and Sciences Department. Their work primarily interrogates the rhetoric of death and dying with a focus on how performance and material culture influence our rituals and understanding of end-of-life, grief, and bereavement. Cheyenne explores how representations and performances of bodies in death reflect and shape marginalized experiences of death as yet another expression of inequity and inequality.
Cheyenne’s work has been published in Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Text & Performance Quarterly, and on The Order of the Good Death’s blog. She is the Vice Chair-Elect of the forthcoming Death and Dying Division at NCA and the Strategic Planning Manager for the End-of-Life and Death Scholars interdisciplinary working group.