Welcome to a special TV promos-themed week from In Media Res. Please feel free to respond to the contributors’ comments.

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, March 31, 2008 – Joshua Green (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) presents: “Where it Belongs: Positioning US dramas on Australian TV”

Tuesday, April 1, 2008 – Maeve Connolly (Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology) presents: “Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind”

Wednesday, April 2, 2008 – Aswin Punathambekar (University of Michigan) presents: “A family drama: Television and the fight for the national family”

Thursday, April 3, 2008 – Miranda Banks (University of Southern California) presents: “Oh, What a Primetime Party: The Night is Young on the WB”

Friday, April 4, 2008 – Stephen Harrington (Queensland University of Technology) presents: “Our Newsreaders “Love You, Queensland”, Please Reciprocate”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via a comment.

I’ve hinted over the last several months that big things were afoot for MediaCommons, but haven’t been able to be terribly specific; at last, however, the haps:

Our friends at the Institute for the Future of the Book have today announced their new institutional partnership with New York University (which NYU likewise announced recently).

Happily, the first fruits of this partnership directly benefit MediaCommons; working with the NYU digital library team, we have received an NEH Digital Startup Grant that will enable us to build the social networking backend for the fully-functional MediaCommons network we’ve been planning.

As Ben notes at if:book, we’re all enormously excited, and we’ll be looking forward to announcing more such developments in the future.

Welcome to a special Oddities-themed week from In Media Res. All the pieces curated this week are from librarians addressing audio-visual archives and other library-based collections. Please feel free to respond to the contributors’ comments.

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, March 24, 2008 – Laurie Taylor (George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida) presents: “Re-contextualizing Archives”

Tuesday, March 25, 2008 – Joel Adams (Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) presents: “The Public Good and Corporate Goodies: A Genealogical Snapshot”

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 – Randall Renner (George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida) presents: “The power of the cliché in Televisionland”

Thursday, March 27, 2008 – Dina Benson (George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida) presents: ” My piece is: Bug vs. Book: The Eternal Struggle”

Friday, March 28, 2008 – Matt Mariner (George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida) presents: “Cream butter? Where’s the milk?!”

Welcome to a special 1970s Masculinity and the Media-themed week from In Media Res. Please feel free to respond to the contributors’ comments.

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, March 17, 2008 – Allison McCracken (DePaul University) presents: “‘The Most Gentle of Men’: Revising the Western Hero in NBC’s Centennial”

Tuesday, March 18, 2008 – Joe Wlodarz (University of Western Ontario) presents: ” Family Affairs: Gay Visibility and Hegemonic Masculinity in ’70s TV”

Wednesday, March 19, 2008 – Elana Levine (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) presents: ” Luke Spencer: General Hospital’s Repentant Rapist”

Thursday, March 20, 2008 – Greg Oguss (University of Southern California) presents: “Righteous Anger and the Fear of a Black Planet in Taxi Driver”

Friday, March 21, 2008 – Avi Santo (Old Dominion University) presents: “Hulk Smash Wimpy White Man Who is Also Hulk: Reasserting Masculine Authority through Masochism”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via a comment.

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, March 10, 2008 – Robert Arnett (Old Dominion University) presents: “Architecture and Narrative in Michael Mann’s Crime Films”.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008 – Lisa Nakamura (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign) presents: “What Steven Wants: Gestural Computing, Digital Manual Labor, and the Boom! Moment”

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 – James Daniel Elam (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) presents: “‘Bollywood’s Index: Allusions and Inside Jokes in Om Shanti Om”

Thursday, March 13, 2008 – Craig O. Stewart (Old Dominion University) presents: “No intelligence allowed?”

Friday, March 14, 2008 – Bernard Timberg (East Carolina University Greenville) presents: “The 2008 Academy Awards Best Picture Nominations and Raymond Williams’ ‘Structure of Feeling’ of the Times”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via a comment.

Make sure you pop by the workshop on Scholarly Writing in the Digital Age, Saturday at noon. Avi and I, plus Alex Juhasz, Christian Keathley, Tara McPherson, and Jason Mittell will all be there, opening a conversation about the new modes of scholarly discourse made possible by networked environments like this one.

With the media studies community converging on Philly for SCMS this week, there will be no new In Media Res posts until next Monday, March 10th, when we will feature pieces by Robert Arnett, J. Daniel Elam, Lisa Nakamura, Craig Stewart, and Bernard Timberg.