WilliamUricchioProfessor of Comparative Media StudiesComparative Media Studies / Writinguricchio@mit.eduE15-313617-452-3182Website http://williamuricchio.comOffice hours by appointmentProfile BottomBioWilliam Uricchio has spent most of his life connecting, moving between, comparing…. His academic studies moved between philosophy (symbolic logic and aesthetics) and cinema studies (early non-fiction representation); his work in documentary moved between theory and practice; his teaching career moved between Europe and the US; and his research trajectory has moved from memory palaces to algorithmic authorship. William is professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he is principal investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab. He is also professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and has held visiting professorships at the University of Stockholm, the Freie Universität Berlin, Phillips-Universität Marburg, and the University of Science and Technology of China. William was one of the leaders of a five-year long European Science Foundation project entitled Changing Media, Changing Europe, and he has received Guggenheim, Humboldt and Fulbright awards, and the Berlin Prize. Research Areas / Expertise: media history and theory; theories of representation; transatlantic cultural flows; audiences and publics; mid-20th C German history; cultural uses of algorithms; documentary Education: 1982 Ph.D. NYU 1975 M.A. NYU ResearchWilliam Uricchio researches and develops histories of "old" media when they were new. His work explores how technologies and human behaviors interact and take form as media, and how those media are used for purposes of representation and indication, and the formation of publics and power. He uses historical precedent and shifting cultural vantage points to anticipate the behaviors of the new, and draws upon the new to reveal overlooked patterns in the historical past. Several particular strands stand out: Taste hierarchies and trans-Atlantic cultural flows, tracing the meanings of European culture in America and vice-versa in the late 19th and 20th centuries; Media culture in interbellum Germany (1919-1939) with a focus on television and sound technologies and the construction of publics; Interactive and immersive documentary, researching the latest pas de deux between technology and representation (see the link to the Open Documentary Lab); Algorithms and cultural production, considering the use and abuse of responsive textual systems. MIT Open Documentary Lab The MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL) seeks to redefine the relationships among documentary makers, their tools, subjects and publics. It looks beyond the traditional linear documentary, focusing instead on the possibilities of the emerging technology scene. Publications “Interactivity and the Modalities of Textual Hacking: From the Bible to Algorithmically Generated Stories” in Sara Pesce & Paolo Nolo, eds., The Politics of Ephemeral Digital Media: Permanence and obsolescence in Paratexts (New York: Routledge, 2016) “Selling the Motion Picture in fin-de-siecle America” in Nico de Klerk, Bo Florin, Patrick Vonderau, Selling to the Senses (London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) “Contextualizing the Apparatus: Film in the Turn-of-the-Century Sears, Roebuck & Co. Consumers Guide’s Department of Special Public Entertainment Outfits and Supplies” in Giovanna Fossati & Annie van den Oever, eds., Exposing the Film Apparatus: The Film Archive as a Research Laboratory (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2016) “Media Specificity and its Discontents: A televisual provocation” in Martin Lefebvre & Nicolas Dulac, eds., From Media to Post-Media: Continuities and Ruptures (Paris: Éditions L'Âge d'Homme, 2016) “The Residue of the National: Conditions of Production and the Trans-Atlantic Divide” in Astrid Böger & Christof Decker, eds., Transnational Mediations (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2015) “Replacement, Displacement and the Cultures of Obsolescence” in Baerbel Tischleder & Sarah Wasserman, Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) “Film, cinema, television … media?” The New Review of Film and Television 12:3 (2014) “History and Its Shadow: thinking about the contours of absence” Screen 55:1(2014 Many More Lives of the Batman 2015 William Uricchio The Many Lives of the Batman (1991) was a pioneer within cultural and comic book scholarship. This fresh new sequel retains the best of the original chapters but also includes images, new chapters and new contributions from the Batman writers and editors. We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities 2009 William Uricchio We Europeans? explores the relationship between media and identity along the fault lines and fissures of the shifting ethnicities, religions, tastes, generations, and languages that make up contemporary Europe. Media Cultures 2006 William Uricchio Set against the backdrop of 9/11 and the war in Iraq, and positioned in the midst of a fast-changing media infrastructure, the collected essays reflect upon the complicated interplay of media and culture at a particularly intense historical juncture. Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films 1993 William Uricchio Between 1907 and 1910, the Vitagraph Company produced "quality" films that promulgated "respectable" culture. The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media 1991 William Uricchio The phenomenal success of Batman: The Movie seemed to signal the apotheosis of the Batman in the American popular imagination. But what social conditions can account for the enduring popularity of such a dark and conflicted character?
