Category: Institute of Communications Research

Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Studies (ICR)

Affiliations

• Department of Media & Cinema Studies
• Institute of Communications Research

Education

• Ph.D., Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2017 
• M.A., Film Studies, Emory University, 2010 
• B.A., History, Middlebury College, 2008

Course Specialties

• Film History
• Media Distribution
• Digital Tools and Historiography

Background

Derek Long is a historian of media industries, specializing in the Hollywood studio system, film distribution, and digital approaches to cinema history. His first book, Playing the Percentages: How Film Distribution Made the Hollywood Studio System (University of Texas Press, 2024), examines the history of film distribution as a dynamic struggle over booking, marketing, and sales practices in the 1910s and 1920s. His articles have been published in Cinema Journal, Film History, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, The Velvet Light Trap, [in]Transition, among other journals and anthologies.

His work also applies digital datasets and tools to questions of media history. As a member of the Project Arclight team, he helped to map “trends” in media history to quantitatively assess the cultural influence of stars, films, studios, the trade press, and other institutions. As creator and manager of Early Cinema History Online (ECHO), a database based on the extensive work of film historians Einar Lauritzen and Gunnar Lundquist, he has indexed and compiled filmographic information covering over 35,000 individual films released in the United States from 1908–1920.

Here at the College of Media, he has taught MACS courses in world cinema, production, film theory, animation history, and graduate media historiography. His other research interests include animation, videographic criticism, early cinema, broadcasting history, avant-garde and cult cinema, and low-budget filmmaking.

Related Links

• Project Arclight
• Illinois Experts

Professor and Interim Head

Affiliations

• Department of Media & Cinema Studies
• Institute of Communications Research 
• Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory

Education

• Ph.D., University of Texas-Austin (1982)
• Degree Certificate, University of Milan, Italy (1979)
• B.A., University of Texas-Austin (1975)

Course Specialties

• Theory and Studies of Communication Media 
• Theory and Studies of Television 
• Communication/Media Technology 
• History and Historiography of Communication/Media
• Cultural Studies 
• Media/Space (Geography, Architecture, Urban Studies) 
• Media & Mobility 
• Globalism and Media/Communication 
• Media & Power 
• Cultural Policy and Citizenship Studies 
• Studies of Modernity

Research and Creative Endeavor

My research concerns a wide variety of media and contexts—from popular media of the 20th century (cinema, television, telephony, radio) to “new media” and forms of “media convergence” to technologies and appliances that are not usually considered “media” (such as cars, buildings, clothes, garage doors, and refrigerators). The forms of analysis that I typically use are interdisciplinary, and informed by a wide variety of theories. Much of my research over the last fifteen years has occurred at the intersection of studies about citizenship and governmentality, media/space (with an interest in architecture, urbanism, design, and geography), Science Studies, and Cultural Studies. My research is oriented as much to past as to the present—as much to residual as to emergent media and their relation to everyday life. Although much of my research is about the U.S. context, some of my research concerns “global” media networks, and some has focused on Italy and Europe.

Related Links

• Illinois Experts

Professor

Affiliations

• Department of Media & Cinema Studies
• Institute of Communications Research
• Department of Gender & Women’s Studies
• Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory
• African American Studies and Research Program
• Department of Sociology
• Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Education

• PhD, University of Southern California
• PhD, University of Iowa

Course Specialties

• New Media Literacy
• Sport & Documentary
• Queer Studies

Background

Cole is the co-editor of “Women, Sport & Culture” (with Susan Birrell) and “Sport and Corporate Nationalisms” (with Michael Silk and David Andrews). She is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled “Good Sports? The Boundaries of American Democracy.” She is the co-editor of the SUNY book series (with Michael Messner), “Sport, Culture & Social Relations,” and editor of the Journal of Sport & Social Issues. She serves on the editorial boards of Cultural Studies — Critical Methodologies, Qualitative Research in Sport & Exercise, and the NYU book series, “Biopolitics: Medicine, Technoscience, & Health in the 21st Century.” She is the recipient of one of the University of Illinois’ Critical Research Initiative Awards and the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Teaching Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Research and Creative Endeavor

Professor Cole was recently on sabbatical and worked with Chicago’s Beyondmedia Education, a non-profit, media-based social justice organization that works with underserved girls and women.

Related Links

• Illinois Experts

Associate Professor

Affiliations

• Department of Media & Cinema Studies
• Institute of Communications Research 
• Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies 
• Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory 

Education

• PhD, American Studies, Yale University
• BA, American Civilization, Brown University

Awards

• Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study, 2020-2021 
• Faculty Fellow, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, 2017-2018 
• Media & Cinema Studies Teaching Award, College of Media, 2016, 2017, 2018 
• Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities Prize for Faculty Research, 2014-2015 
• Fellow of the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, 2013-2014 

Research and Creative Endeavor

Amanda Ciafone is a cultural historian of capitalism, especially interested in culture industries and the role of the media in constructing meaning around economic and social relations. Her research and teaching is at the nexus of various fields including cultural history and cultural studies of the United States in the world, especially Latin America; political economy; culture and media industries; and social movements. 

Professor Ciafone’s first book, Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation (University of California, 2019), examines The Coca-Cola Company and the politics, cultural representations, and social movements around the multinational corporation. Additional research and teaching materials can be found in the Scalar-produced multimedia digital companion to Counter-Cola. 

She is currently at work on a new book project on the relationship between technology and old age, as part of the new, growing field of humanistic studies of aging. 

Professor Ciafone co-edits the University of Illinois books series, The Geopolitics of Information, which publishes critical studies of global media and political economy.

Related Links

• Illinois Experts

Professor of Media & Cinema Studies

Education

• Ph.D., Program in the History and Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Society, MIT
• S.M., Program in Comparative Media Studies, MIT
• B.A., Journalism and Women’s Studies, New York University

Affiliations

• Associate Professor of Information Sciences 
• Associate Professor of Media and Cinema Studies
• Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellow 2020-21, National Center for Supercomputing Applications
• Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
• Department of Anthropology
• Department of Asian American Studies
• Data & Society Research Institute

Course Specialties

• New Media/Network Cultures 
• Science and Technology Studies 
• Globalization and Innovation Economies 
• AI + Democracy
• Community Data

Research and Creative Endeavor

Anita Say Chan is an Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research and teaching interests include globalization and digital cultures, innovation networks and the “periphery”, science and technology studies in Latin America, and feminist and decolonial approaches to technology. She received her PhD in 2008 from the MIT Doctoral Program in History; Anthropology; and Science, Technology, and Society. Her first book the competing imaginaries of global connection and information technologies in network-age Peru, Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism was released by MIT Press in 2014. Her research has been awarded support from the Center for the Study of Law & Culture at Columbia University’s School of Law and the National Science Foundation, and she has held postdoctoral fellowships at The CUNY Graduate Center’s Committee on Globalization & Social Change, and at Stanford University’s Introduction to Humanities Program. She is a faculty affiliate at the Department of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. She is a Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where she directs the Community Data Clinic. With colleagues in the Computer Science Department at UIUC, she co-leads the Just Infrastructures Initiative. She is a 2020–21 Faculty Affiliate with the Data & Society Research Institute, is a collaborator and co-author of the Feminist Data Manifest-NO project, and will be a Fulbright Specialist in Bogota, Colombia working on feminist data collectives in Latin America.

Related Links

• #unsettle: The Periphery is Everywhere, Data & Society profile
• Feminist Data Manifest-No: A Collective Reading
• Chan to present research at CSCW 2020
• Illinois Experts