Anna McCarthy

Anna McCarthy is Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies. She served for eight years as Coeditor of the journal Social Text and currently edits Social Text Online. Her research areas are media studies and media theory. Her first book, Ambient Television (2001) looked at the cultural, commercial, and political uses of video screens in public space. Her second, The Citizen Machine (2010), traced how various postwar institutions–labor unions, philanthropies, big business–experimented with television programming as a tool for governance. Among her co-edited volumes is the anthology MediaSpace (2004), which brought together an international group of media scholars to examine the spatial logics of media objects ranging from the smart house to the Sony Walkman. Her current research focuses on Irish film and television in the context of the cultural transition from theocracy to secular state. A fiction writer, her stories have appeared in the journals Pacifica Literary Review, Litro, Short Fiction, and The London Reader.