Tara McPherson, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

213.740.3330
tmcphers@usc.edu
LUC 409
http://www.vectorsjournal.org/

Professor McPherson teaches courses in digital media, television, and popular culture. Her Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South received the 2004 John G. Cawelti Award for the outstanding book published on American Culture, a USC's Phi Kappa Phi award for outstanding scholarship, and was a finalist for the Kovacs Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is co-editor of the anthology Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Camera Obscura, The Velvet Light Trap, Discourse, Race in Cyberspace, 24, The New Media Handbook, The Visual Culture Reader 2.0, Virtual Publics and Basketball Jones.
She is currently co-editing two anthologies on new technology (including one for the MacArthur Foundation’s initiative in Digital Media and Learning) and working on a book manuscript on new media.

McPherson was co-organizer of the 1999 conference Interactive Frictions and is among the founding organizers of Race in Digital Space, an initiative supported by the Annenberg Center for Communication and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. A member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Television Academy Archives, McPherson is a core member of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), has served as an AFI Television Awards juror, is on the board of several journals, and is the founding editor of Vectors.