Tara Mcpherson

About

Tara McPherson, Ph.D., is the HMH Foundation Endowed Chair for the Study of Censorship in Media and a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. She is also the Director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Studies and a core Ph.D. advisor in the Media Arts + Practice program. Her research engages the cultural dimensions of media, including the intersection of gender, race, affect, and place, with a particular focus on digital media. Her work explores digital humanities, early software histories, gender, and race, as well as the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship. Currently, she is examining the spread of hate through online networks and creating anti-fascist media through The Reclaim Project. McPherson authored the book Feminist in a Software Lab, published by Harvard University Press in 2018, which received the 2018 Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities. Her previous work includes Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South, which received the 2004 John G. Cawelti Award, and she has co-edited several volumes on media and culture. She is a prominent speaker on digital humanities, digital scholarship, youth and media, and gender and technology studies, and has been actively involved in initiatives supporting digital scholarship and pedagogy.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Humanities
• History
• Art

Selected publications

• Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected

  Directory of Open access Books (OAPEN Foundation) · 2018-03-11 · 70 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  How emergent practices and developments in young people's digital media can result in technological innovation or lead to unintended learning experiences and unanticipated social encounters.Young people's use of digital media may result in various innovations and unexpected outcomes, from the use of videogame technologies to create films to the effect of home digital media on family life. This volume examines the core issues that arise when digital media use results in unintended learning experi…

  PublisherOA PDF

• Designing for Difference

  differences · 2014-04-24 · 32 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This piece considers some recent variations on the debate around the role of cultural theory within the digital humanities, code studies, and platform studies in order to argue for a theoretically explicit form of digital praxis within the digital humanities. It takes seriously Gary Hall’s recent claim that the very goals of critical theory and of quantitative or computational analysis may in fact be incommensurable. The author argues that there is something particular to the very forms of digit…

  PublisherDOI

• Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities

  University of California Press eBooks · 2014-07-25 · 28 citations

  bookSenior author

  Editors Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson present an authoritative collection of essays on the continuing debates over medium specificity and the politics of the digital arts. Comparing the term transmedia with transnational, they show that the movement beyond specific media or nations does not invalidate those entities but makes us look more closely at the cultural specificity of each combination. In two parts, the book stages debates across essays, creating dialogues that give different narrati…

  Publisher

• Post-Archive: The Humanities, the Archive, and the Database

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2015-05-22 · 17 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter contains sections titled: Archival Histories/Database Futures, Engaging the Database, Notes

  PublisherDOI

• Feminist in a Software Lab

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2018-02-19 · 13 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Henry Jenkins

  6 shared

• Kirsten Ostherr

  Rice University

  6 shared

• Elizabeth Losh

  William & Mary

  6 shared

• Patrick Vonderau

  6 shared

• Jason Farman

  University of Maryland, College Park

  6 shared

• Heidi Rae Cooley

  6 shared

• Bo Reimer

  6 shared

• Jane Shattuc

  6 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Cinema and Media Studies

  University of Southern California

• M.A., American Studies

  Duke University

• B.A., American Studies

  University of California, Santa Barbara

Awards & honors

• The Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities (2018)
• John G. Cawelti Award for the outstanding book published on…

Similar researchers at University of Southern California

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• Aniko Imreh-15
• Nitin Govilh-8