Center for Media at Risk: Intro Colloquium

Speaker(s): Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Cherian George & Ruth Ben-Ghiat

On Wednesday, September 5 we welcomed our 2018-2019 Visiting Scholars!

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun will be the Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media at Simon Fraser University, after having been Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University since 2010.  Her current work on digital media draws from her background in both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011) and Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016).  She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), American Academy of Berlin and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She has been the Velux Visiting Professor of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School, the Wayne Morse Chair for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon, Visiting Professor at Leuphana University (Luneburg, Germany) and Visiting Associate Professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard, of which she is currently an Associate. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled Discriminating Data: Individuals, Neighborhoods, Proxies.

Chun is a Fall 2018 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Media at Risk and teaching a graduate course Critical Data Studies. She will present a colloquium on October 24, 2018 and a public lecture on November 20, 2018.

Cherian George is Professor of Media Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. One of his two main research areas is media freedom, especially in Asia. He is co-authoring a book on media and power in Southeast Asia for Cambridge University Press and has started work on a global study of the political censorship of cartoons. His other main research focus is on hate propaganda. His 2016 monograph Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offense and its Threat to Democracy (MIT Press) studied hate campaigns in the United States, India and Indonesia. Publishers Weekly named it as one of the 100 best books of 2016. George has a PhD in Communication from Stanford and graduated from Columbia University’s journalism school. He previously worked as a journalist in his native Singapore.

George is a Fall 2018 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Media at Risk and teaching a graduate course Censorship: A Global Survey. He will present a public lecture on October 9, 2018 and a colloquium on November 28, 2018.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. The recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright and other fellowships, she is an expert on fascism, authoritarianism and propaganda. She writes regular columns for CNN, the Washington Post and other outlets on those topics and on Donald Trump. Her latest book is an award-winning study of Fascist visual propaganda, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (2015). She is now writing Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall (Norton), which looks at the assault on the media by authoritarian leaders from Mussolini to Trump.

Ben-Ghiat is a Spring 2019 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Media at Risk and will be teaching a graduate course Propaganda and the Media in Dictatorships and Democracies. She will present a colloquium on January 23, 2019 and a public lecture on March 26, 2019.

Event details

Annenberg School of Communication