Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Co-coordinating Editor and Press Director

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of English and Media Studies at Pomona College, in Claremont, California, where she is also a member of the extended faculties in Cultural Studies and in Information Systems and Technology at Claremont Graduate University.

Kathleen first worked in electronic publishing as a freelance editor during graduate school in the mid-1990s, working on projects for the Voyager Company and Penguin Electronic. She began having conversations with colleagues about the possibility of founding an all-electronic scholarly press a couple of years ago; these conversations finally bore fruit with a widely-read essay on the subject posted on The Valve. This essay led to an initial meeting with the Institute, during which we began planning a larger meeting of scholars in media studies and related fields, held at the Annenberg Center for Communication in April 2006.

Kathleen’s book, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, was released in June 2006 by Vanderbilt University Press. She has published articles and notes in journals including Contemporary Literature and Cinema Journal, and she is a member of the editorial board of the database anthology Pearson Custom Library: Introduction to Literature. She has blogged at Planned Obsolescence since 2002.

Avi Santo, Co-coordinating Editor and Community Director

Avi Santo is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Theatre and Dance at Old Dominion University. Avi received his PhD from the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, where, along with fellow graduate student Christopher Lucas, he started Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture in October, 2004. Flow’s mission is to provide a space where researchers, teachers, students, and the public can read and write about and discuss the changing landscape of contemporary media at the speed that media moves. Since its inception, many of the top media scholars in North America have contributed columns, and the journal has become widely known for its insightful, accessible, and provocative scholarship, and for its community-building role amongst those, both inside the academy and beyond, who study the media.

Avi also organized the Flow conference on October 26-28, 2006 in Austin, Texas, which was designed to promote discussion amongst scholars, members of the media industries, media activists, fans, and policy-makers over crucial issues related to television and media.

After participating in the one-day brain-storming session out at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California last April on creating an academic digital press, Avi was invited to a follow-up meeting in Brooklyn in June with Kathleen, Bob and Ben, from which emerged plans to develop a scholarly network that could address the future of the academic in a digital publishing environment. The result has been the creation of MediaCommons.

Editorial Board

Tim Anderson, Denison University
Jeremy Butler, University of Alabama
Richard Edwards, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State University
Chris Keathley, Middlebury College
Kari Kraus, Zotero Project: Center for History and New Media
Tara McPherson, University of Southern California
Jason Mittell, Middlebury College
Lisa Nakamura, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Clancy Ratliff, East Carolina University
Judd Ruggill, University of Arizona
Chuck Tryon, Fayetteville State University