Lisa Parks

Lisa Parks

Credit: Erin Valkner.

Lisa Parks, Ph.D. is a media theorist who writes on television, satellites, drones, and infrastructures of surveillance.

Parks, a Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, previously worked at UC Santa Barbara (1998-2016) where she chaired the Department of Film and Media Sudies (2008-2011) and served as Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society (2012-2015). Parks is an interdisciplinary researcher and has collaborated with international artists. Her current research is focused in three related areas: satellite technologies and global media cultures; critical studies of media infrastructures; and media, militarization and surveillance. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke UP, 2005), Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, forthcoming), and Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies (in progress). She is co-editor of: Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke UP, forthcoming 2017), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers UP, 2012), Undead TV (Duke UP, 2007) Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU, 2003). Parks has held visiting appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, McGill University, University of Southern California, and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Research
Feminist Studies, Drones, Vertical Mediation, and the Targeted Class
Spectral Configuration, 2015 Interactive Multimedia Installation
Media Fields Journal, Rise of the IMSI Catcher