Hello! I’m the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies, with a secondary appointment in History of Art, at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. I’m also the Director of Creative Research and Practice at the Metropolitan New York Library Council, where I previously served on the board of directors and later as its president. Prior to my arrival at Penn, I worked for 18.5 years at The New School, in New York, where I served on the faculty in both the Department of Anthropology and the School of Media Studies. (I’ve thus held tenured, full professorships in three fields: media studies, anthropology, and history of art.) While at TNS, I directed the graduate program in media studies and the undergraduate major and minor in anthropology; launched and directed the graduate minor in Anthropology + Design; collaborated regularly with various programs across the Parsons School of Design; and served on well over 100 committees.
My writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. I’m the author of four books: The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; and Code and Clay, Dirt and Data: 5000 Years of Urban Media, all published by University of Minnesota Press; and A City Is Not a Computer published by Princeton University Press in 2021. I’ve also published over 100 articles and book chapters, most of them in open-access venues, including a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures for Places, an open-access journal focusing on architecture, urbanism, and landscape. I also contribute to public design and interactive projects and exhibitions.
I’ve advised over 70 graduate theses and dissertations and designed and taught over 40 courses on topics ranging from urban technology, maps, and information infrastructures to design ethnography, local media, and critical university studies – and, since 2002, I’ve created a public website for nearly all of those courses. I’m grateful to have won The New School’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and to have had the opportunity to work with thousands of inspiring students, many of whom have gone on to do amazing things.
Also: I like art, music, and dogs. I live between Philadelphia and New York, but my heart belongs to the latter.
