William Charles Uricchio

ISEA 2011

William Charles Uricchio is professor and director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program and professor of comparative media history at Utrecht University. He has held visiting professorships at Stockholm University, the Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Science and Technology of China, and Philips Universität Marburg; and Guggenheim, Fulbright and Humboldt fellowships have supported his research. At MIT, Uricchio is principal investigator of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab; the Center for Future Civic Media; and the Convergence Culture Consortium.

His scholarly research considers the interplay of media technologies and cultural practices in relation to the (re-) construction of representation, knowledge and publics. In part, he researches and develops new histories of ‘old’ media when they were new (early photography, telephony, film, broadcasting, and today’s ‘new’ media). And in part, he investigates media cultures and their audiences through research into such areas as peer-to-peer communities and cultural citizenship, media and cultural identity, and historical representation. His most recent books include Media Cultures (2006 Heidelberg), on responses to media in post 9/11 Germany and the US, and We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identity (2008 Chicago University Press & Intellect). He is currently completing a manuscript on the concept of the televisual from the 17th century to the present.