This reading, part of MIT’s William Corbett Poetry Series, welcomes former U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze back to the campus where he began his literary journey. Introduced by Chloe Garcia Roberts and Nick Montfort, the event reflects on poetry’s enduring place at MIT and its power to shape lives and communities across generations. Sze’s visit highlights the unexpected connections and “rhymes” that emerge over time through teaching, mentorship, and the art of poetry. Sze is the author of twelve b...
Apr 05, 2026•53 min
The acclaimed author of "The Serpent’s Gift", Helen Elaine Lee, returns with this poetic and powerful journey of healing and autonomy. About the Book As she wraps up her four-year sentence for opiate possession at Oak Hills Correctional Center, Ranita Atwater is determined to stay clean and regain custody of her two children from the aunts who have been raising them. Leaving behind her lover Maxine, who has helped to awaken and inspire her, she must face a world of temptations, confront the woun...
Oct 04, 2023•1 hr 23 min
How and why, in the latter half of the twentieth century, did informatic theories of “code” developed around cybernetics and information theory take root in research settings as varied as Palo Alto family therapy, Parisian semiotics, and new-fangled cultural theories ascendant at US liberal arts colleges? Drawing on his recently published book “Code: From Information Theory to French Theory,” and primary sources from the MIT archives, this talk explores how far-flung technocratic exercises in As...
Apr 09, 2023•1 hr 18 min
The Propagandists’ Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy peels back the layers of the right-wing media manipulation machine to reveal why its strategies are so effective and pervasive, while also humanizing the people whose worldviews and media practices conservatism embodies. Based on interviews and ethnographic observations of two Republican groups over the course of the 2018 Virginia gubernatorial race-including the author’s firsthand experience of the 201...
Feb 28, 2023•53 min
An exploration into the underlying fundamental functions, structures, and principles of rap. Open to the public, the talk was hosted at MIT on November 30, 2022. Wasalu Jaco, professionally known as Lupe Fiasco, is a Chicago-born, Grammy award-winning American rapper, record producer, entrepreneur, and community advocate. Rising to fame in 2006, following the success of his debut album Food & Liquor, Lupe has released eight acclaimed studio albums, his latest being Drill Music In Zion, relea...
Dec 05, 2022•1 hr 30 min
Sam Gregory is Director of Programs, Strategy & Innovation at WITNESS, which helps people use video and technology to protect human rights; studies relationship between emergent technologies, disinformation, media manipulation, & authoritarianism.
Oct 06, 2022•1 hr 3 min
William Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, which brings together storytellers, technologists, and scholars to experiment with new documentary.
Oct 06, 2022•1 hr 7 min
Full title: “Between freedom & oppression: The long & ambiguous (pre)history of audiovisual in the Black experience” Featuring Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Ekene Mekwunye, Jepchumba, and Russel Hlongwane. Chakanetsa Mavhunga is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mavhunga explores international history, theory, and practice of science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship, with a focus on Africa. Ekene Mekwunye is adjunct faculty at...
Oct 06, 2022•58 min
Professor Heather Hendershot's opening plenary from the "Bearing Witness, Seeking Justice" conference, with initial remarks by Dean Agustín Rayo and Tracie Jones, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Hendershot is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She studies television news, conservative media, political movements, and American film and television history. Her 2022 book is "When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America", available from the Universi...
Oct 06, 2022•1 hr 11 min
Kelli Moore is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University who examines how media and technology produce legal and political knowledge to inform public debates on visual literacy, race, and other issues.
Oct 05, 2022•57 min
Video also available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-seeing-silicon-valley-mary-beth-meehan-fred-turner. Acclaimed photographer Mary Beth Meehan and Silicon Valley historian and media scholar Fred Turner discuss their recently published and award-winning book Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America, a collaborative exploration of the culture of Silicon Valley — not the culture of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg that we see in the press, but the lives of the men and women who inhabit the ...
May 05, 2022•1 hr 21 min
Charles North has published twelve books of poems, three books of critical prose, and collaborations with artists and other poets. With James Schuyler, he edited the poet/painter anthologies Broadway and Broadway 2. His New and Selected Poems What It Is Like (2011) headed NPR’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, and he has received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, four Fund for Poetry Awards, and a Poets Foundation Award. He lives with his wi...
Apr 21, 2022•38 min
In her 2021 book Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech, our guest Martha Minow “outlines an array of reforms, including a new fairness doctrine, regulating digital platforms as public utilities, using antitrust authority to regulate the media, policing fraud, and more robust funding of public media. As she stresses, such reforms are not merely plausible ideas; they are the kinds of initiatives needed if the First Amendment guarantee of fr...
Apr 15, 2022•1 hr 21 min
This talk reconsiders the role of television entertainment in American political life in the 1970s and beyond. Focusing on the situation comedy All in the Family (CBS, 1971-1979), the talk looks at a turn to politics in entertainment and a turn to entertainment in politics. In the 1970s, fictive characters, including Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O’Connor) and Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton) of All in the Family but also Hawkeye Pierce (played by Alan Alda) of MAS*H and Mary Richards (played by...
Apr 11, 2022•1 hr 25 min
In this talk, Jens Pohlmann compares the discourse about the regulation of social media platforms and its effect on freedom of expression in Germany and the United States. Drawing on computational methods, he analyzes the discussion about a German anti-hate speech law called the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) and the debate about a reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the United States in different media environments (IT-blogs, newspapers, social media). Ultimately, he co...
Apr 01, 2022•1 hr 20 min
These six poets met as undergrads at MIT, brought together by the many things they shared: the challenges of being women in STEM, their lifelong pursuits of becoming better Muslims, and the exhaustion of drinking from the academic firehose. Through sharing their poetry, they want to foster empathy and mutual reciprocity for those who don’t often see someone like them within literary spaces. The poems they share at this reading focus on family, identity, and homeland—where they come from and how ...
Mar 31, 2022•43 min
In this talk, Racquel Gates presents her experience working as consulting producer on the Criterion release of Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films. A legendary filmmaker whose unique personality is just as well-known as his body of work, Van Peebles made an indelible impact on both Black film and independent cinema. How, then, to present new insights on Van Peebles in a way that built on viewers’ existing familiarity with the filmmaker and his work while avoiding cliches and hagiography? In “Rei...
Mar 18, 2022•1 hr 23 min
College radio has long been known as the weird, wacky signals on the left of the FM dial offering music that would never be mainstream. But this wasn’t always the case—and moreover, even at stations exemplifying musical adventurousness and the community potential of college signals, institutional constraints loomed. In this talk, Katherine Jewell delves into the history of WMBR at MIT from the 1960s to the 1980s to explore how this station, with a license held by an independent non-profit corpor...
Mar 11, 2022•1 hr 21 min
David Thorburn has been a teacher of literature for 57 years, 46 of them at MIT where he is Professor of Literature and Comparative Media and Director Emeritus of the MIT Communications Forum. Generations of MIT undergraduates have taken his lecture course, “The Film Experience,” which now reaches an international audience on YouTube. He was born in Manhattan and grew up in an old farmhouse in Randolph, New Jersey. He’s written a book on Joseph Conrad and many essays and reviews on literature an...
Mar 03, 2022•44 min
Podcasts are in a golden age and are being used to effectively communicate new ideas, tell compelling stories, and build highly participative communities. This presentation will explore the power of audio storytelling to connect individuals in engaged networks of collaboration. Jorge Caraballo (’22 Harvard Nieman Fellow) will draw from experience as the former Growth Editor at Radio Ambulante –Latin America’s most popular documentary podcast– and will highlight different ways in which storytelli...
Feb 18, 2022•1 hr 24 min
Video game engines have promoted a new cultural economy for software production and have provided a common architecture for digital content creation across what were once distinct media verticals—film, television, video games and other immersive and interactive media forms that can leverage real-time 3D visualization. Game engines are the building blocks for efficient real-time visualization, and they signal quite forcefully the colonizing influence of programming. Video game engines are powerin...
Feb 11, 2022•1 hr 20 min
Lynn Nottage’s 2011 satirical play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark stages the life and legacy of the fictional Vera Stark, a Black maid and struggling actress during Hollywood’s golden age. Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer prize-winning playwright and screenwriter, was inspired in part by the career of African American actress, singer, and dancer Theresa Harris. A play about Black women’s cinematic representation and social erasure, Nottage’s fabrication of film history extends beyond the staged plot to...
Feb 04, 2022•1 hr 19 min
Transcript and video available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-alexandra-to-design-opportunities-centering-racialized-experiences-game. People of color have always been present in games as designers, developers, players, and critics. As Kishonna Gray further expounds, gaming is a site for “resistance, activism, and mobilization among marginalized users.” In this talk Alexandra To describes some of the game design opportunities present in centering the experiences of people of color from the beginni...
Dec 10, 2021•1 hr 12 min
In this talk, Craig Robertson provides a brief overview of the some of the themes of his recent book, The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (Minnesota, 2021). He argues the emergence of the filing cabinet illustrates an important moment in the genealogy of the ascendance of modern information. He highlights a moment when information became a label for an instrumental form of knowledge, as information is connected to gendered ideas of efficiency and labor. Storing loose sheets of ...
Nov 18, 2021•1 hr 18 min
Graphic novel creator Leela Corman talk's and Q&A about her graphic novels and short comics on the topics of generational and personal trauma, New York City history, Polish-Jewish life, and amateur women’s wrestling. Corman is a painter, educator, and graphic novel creator. Her books include Unterzakhn (Schocken/Pantheon, 2012) and the short comics collection We All Wish For Deadly Force (Retrofit/Big Planet, 2016). She is currently at work on the graphic novel Victory Parade, a story about ...
Nov 04, 2021•1 hr 24 min
This presentation defines the phrase “transgender exigency” as a situation marked by an urgent need; in this case, the need to address the political and definitional challenges evinced by the need for transgender rights. The presentation provides evidence for substantial prejudice against transgender people, as well as the dramatic increase in transgender visibility and rights in the 2010s. The collision of prejudice and visibility has led to a series of controversies that involve “regulatory de...
Oct 29, 2021•1 hr 19 min
Video and transcript available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-memorial-colloquium-in-honor-of-jing-wang ====== Professor Jing Wang — a beloved longtime colleague, vocal supporter of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, and mentor to countless students and fellow faculty — passed away at age 71 this past July. At this Colloquium, we publicly honor her life and work, featuring brief talks by some of those who knew her best. They include: Emma J. Teng, T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civiliza...
Oct 21, 2021•1 hr 3 min
This talk introduces arguments and examples from Nick Thurston’s current book project, Document Practices, which explores aesthetic and political frameworks for analyzing acts of re-publishing already public documents. With case studies that range from shadow libraries to experimental videos, and ideas about “the document” which haunt the sociology of literature as much as documentary arts practice, Nick sketches out the project’s starting points and some of its key debates. Nick Thurston is a w...
Oct 14, 2021•1 hr 22 min
In this talk, Victoria Cain provides a brief overview of some of the themes of her new book, Schools and Screens: A Watchful History, and a deeper dive into a few defining experiments with educational media in twentieth century US schools. Her talk will focus on the struggle of successive generations of education reformers who attempted to meet massive social and economic crises through careful instruction in media viewing and collective discussion. Cain will consider how and why these reformers...
Sep 30, 2021•1 hr 23 min
With the proliferation of social media, internet memes have become a ubiquitous part of everyday communication. However, the power of memes cannot be fully understood without considering their role in the complex relationship between technology, space, and politics. This talk will conceptualize memes as cultural mapping tools—tools that chart out the cultural hierarchies in relation to spatial and political relations for their makers and users. Focusing on memes made by Palestinians in mixed cit...
Sep 22, 2021•1 hr 17 min
