Tara McPherson is the HMH Foundation Endowed Chair for the Study of Censorship in Media and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, contributing to the Arts and Culture faculty. She directs the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Studies, serves as a core Ph.D. advisor in the Media Arts + Practice program, and is an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department. Holding a Ph.D., her research delves into the cultural dimensions of media, focusing on the intersections of gender, race, affect, and place. She specializes in digital media, including digital humanities, early software histories, and the creation of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship. Currently, she investigates the propagation of hate through online networks and develops anti-fascist media via The Reclaim Project. Before joining USC, McPherson taught at MIT.

McPherson has produced significant scholarly works, including the award-winning Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke University Press, 2003), recipient of the 2004 John G. Cawelti Award for the outstanding book on American Culture; Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (co-editor, Duke University Press, 2003); Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected (editor, MIT Press, 2008); Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities (co-editor, University of California Press, 2014); and Feminist in a Software Lab (Harvard University Press, 2018), which earned the 2018 Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities. Her articles appear in journals such as Camera Obscura, American Literature, The Velvet Light Trap, Discourse, and Screen. She founded and edited Vectors, a multimedia peer-reviewed journal with the Open Humanities Press, and the MacArthur-supported International Journal of Learning and Media (MIT Press). As original lead PI on the Scalar multimedia platform, founding organizer of the Race in Digital Space project backed by the Annenberg, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations, advisory board member of the Mellon-funded Scholarly Communications Institute, founding board member of HASTAC, and juror for AFI and Peabody Awards, McPherson has profoundly influenced digital scholarship and media studies.

Professional Email: tmcphers@usc.edu