The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications is a constituent school of Northwestern University that offers both undergraduate and graduate programs. It frequently ranks as the top school of journalism in the United States. Medill alumni include over 40 Pulitzer Prize laureates, numerous national correspondents for major networks, many well-known reporters, columnists and media executives.
Howard Saul Becker was an American sociologist who taught at Northwestern University. Becker made contributions to the sociology of deviance, sociology of art, and sociology of music. Becker also wrote extensively on sociological writing styles and methodologies. Becker's 1963 book Outsiders provided the foundations for labeling theory. Becker was often called a symbolic interactionist or social constructionist, although he did not align himself with either method. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Becker was considered part of the second Chicago School of Sociology, which also includes Erving Goffman and Anselm Strauss.
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was a research centre at the University of Birmingham, England. It was founded in 1964 by Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart, its first director. From 1964 to 2002, it played a critical role in developing the field of cultural studies.
Laura Kipnis is an American cultural critic and essayist. Her work focuses on sexual politics, gender issues, aesthetics, popular culture, and pornography. She began her career as a video artist, exploring similar themes in the form of video essays. She is professor of media studies at Northwestern University in the Department of Radio-TV-Film, where she teaches filmmaking. In recent years she has become known for debating sexual harassment and free speech policies in higher education.
Carl Wilbur Condit was an American historian of urban and architectural history, a writer, professor, and teacher. He was professor at Northwestern University 1945–82. He wrote numerous books and articles on the history of American building, especially Chicago, Cincinnati, and the Port of New York. He founded the History of Science Department at Northwestern University, where he taught for over 30 years. His research specialty was the architecture of Chicago, Illinois, and he lived in Chicago most of his life, having moved there in 1945 in order to study its urban and technological development.
Lila Abu-Lughod is a Palestinian-American anthropologist. She is the Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City. She specializes in ethnographic research in the Arab world, and her seven books cover topics including sentiment and poetry, nationalism and media, gender politics and the politics of memory.
Elayne Antler Rapping was an American critic and analyst of popular culture and social issues. She authored several books covering topics such as media theory, popular culture, women's issues, and the portrayal of the legal system on television. As a regular contributor to such publications as The Nation, The Progressive, and The New York Times, she wrote on a wide variety of cultural issues including film and movie reviews.
Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar is a Professor in Rhetoric and Public Culture and the Director of Center for Global Culture and Communication at Northwestern University. He is also Executive Director of the Center for Transcultural Studies, an independent scholarly research network concerned with global issues based in Chicago and New York. Gaonkar was closely associated with the influential journal Public Culture from the early 1990s, serving in various editorial capacities: associate editor (1992-2000), executive editor (2000-2009), and editor (2009-2011).
Lee Albert Siegel is a novelist and professor emeritus of religion at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His 1999 novel, Love in a Dead Language, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a bestseller in India.
Joshua Weiner is an American poet.
Sarah McFarland Taylor is an American academic and author. She is currently Associate Professor of Religion in the Department of Religious Studies at Northwestern University, where she also teaches in the Environmental Policy and Culture Program and in American Studies. Areas of research focus include studies of media, religion, and culture; public moral engagement in environmental issues; and consumerism, marketing, and popular culture. She holds a Bachelor's degree from Brown University, a Master's degree from Dartmouth College, and a doctorate in Religion and American Culture from the University of California, Santa Barbara. As of 2019, she earned an additional advanced degree in “Media History, Philosophy, and Criticism” from the Graduate School of Media Studies at The New School for Public Engagement.
Gwendolyn Wright is an architectural historian and author. She was one of the hosts of the PBS television series History Detectives. She is a professor of architecture at Columbia University, also holding appointments in both its departments of history and art history. Dr. Wright's specialties are US architectural history and urban history from after the Civil War to the present. She also writes about the exchange across national boundaries of architectural styles, influences, and techniques, particularly examining the colonial and neo-colonial attributes of both modernism and historic preservation.
Peter Filkins is an American poet and literary translator. Filkins graduated from Williams College with a Bachelor of Arts and from Columbia University with a Master of Fine Arts degree. His poetry collections include the forthcoming Water / Music, as well as The View We’re Granted, co-winner of the 2013 Sheila Motton Best Book Award from the New England Poetry Club, and Augustine’s Vision, winner of the 2009 New American Press Chapbook Award. His poems, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including The New Republic, Partisan Review, The New Criterion, Poetry, The Yale Review, the New York Times Book Review, and the Los Angeles Times. He is a recipient of a 2005 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, a 2015-2016 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a 2014 Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Austria. In 2012 he was writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House, and he has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.
Jan Olsson is a Swedish film scholar, professor of cinema studies and former head of department at Stockholm University. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Southern California, UCLA, Northwestern University, Utrecht University and the City University of Hong Kong. Olsson is the founding editor of John Libbey's book series Stockholm Studies in Cinema, and the founding editor of the scholarly journal Aura Film Studies Journal. Along his trajectory of archival research, he has found copies of two previously lost early films, Buster Keaton's The Cook and Fatty Arbuckle's A Reckless Romeo. He currently leads the research project “From Business Commodities to Revered Cultural Heritage: Global Media, Vernacular Strategies, and Cultural Negotiations,” funded by a grant from Vetenskapsrådet . He is also responsible editor of Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis' cinema studies series—distributed by Stockholm University library.
Maria Gertrudis "Mieke" Bal is a Dutch cultural theorist, video artist, and Professor Emerita in Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam. Previously she also was Academy Professor of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and co-founder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.
Lisa Cartwright is a scholar, author, professor and critic best known for helping to found the field of visual culture studies and for coauthoring Practices of Looking, a widely translated visual studies textbook with Marita Sturken that is regarded as one of the first comprehensive books in the field after John Berger's Ways of Seeing. In Practices of Looking, Cartwright and Sturken examine the complexity of the relationship between viewers and objects in a variety of visual media ranging from film and photography to advertising, painting, and printmaking. They pay especially close attention to the historical, social, and psychological conditions that help to constitute 'seeing' at any given moment.
Hamid Naficy is an Iranian-born American filmmaker, writer, scholar, and educator. He is the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication at Northwestern University in the department of Radio/Film/Television, an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Art History, and a core member of the Middle East and North African Studies Program.
Alexandra Munroe is an American curator, Asia scholar, and author focusing on art, culture, and institutional global strategy. She has produced over 40 exhibitions and published pioneering scholarship on modern and contemporary Asian art. She organized the first major North American retrospectives of artists Yayoi Kusama (1989), Daido Moriyama (1999), Yoko Ono (2000), Mu Xin (2001), Cai Guo-Qiang (2008), and Lee Ufan (2011), among others, and has brought such historic avant-garde movements as Gutai, Mono-ha, and Chinese conceptual art, as well as Japanese otaku culture, to international attention. Her project Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994) is recognized for initiating the field of postwar Japanese art history in North America. Recently, Munroe was lead curator of the Guggenheim’s exhibition, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, which the New York Times named as one of 2017’s top ten exhibitions and ARTnews named as one of the decade’s top 25 most influential shows. Credited for the far-reaching impact of her exhibitions and scholarship bolstering knowledge of postwar Japanese art history in America and Japan, she received the 2017 Japan Foundation Award and the 2018 Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award, both bestowed by the government of Japan.
Jeffrey Sconce is a professor and cultural historian of media and film. He is a professor in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern University.
Vicki Mayer is professor of communication and media. She currently works at Tulane University in New Orleans Louisiana, where she holds the Louise Riggio Chair for Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Mayer is an influential academic for her research on media production and consumption, specifically relating to economic and political transformations in creative industries. Her writings on production range from student publishing, community media, ethnic journalism and urban sign production, and have significantly contributed to the Communication School of Liberal Arts. Mayer's most downloaded article on the internet explores the origins and performance of ‘flashing’ in New Orleans.
