University of Southern California

Faculty Member, Institute for Multimedia Literacy

School of Cinematic Arts

About

Virginia Kuhn serves as associate director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML), and assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Her work centers on the ways in which communication and expression are impacted by digital culture, particularly with the addition of sound, images and interactivity as semiotic resources. Kuhn joined the IML in 2005 after successfully defending one of the first born-digital dissertations in the United States, challenging archiving and copyright conventions. Her dissertation, Ways of Composing: Visual Literacy in the Digital Age, was created in TK3, the precursor to the USC-based, open source media-authoring program, Sophie. Committed to helping shape open source tools for scholarship, she recently published the first article created in the authoring platform, Scalar. “Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate,” appeared in the International Journal of Learning and Media. Kuhn was the 2009 recipient of the USC Provost’s award for Teaching with Technology, and she co-chairs the Special Interest Group on Media Literacy, Outreach, and Activism for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Kuhn is an assistant editor for the Praxis section of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, and serves on the editorial board of PRE/TEXT: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory. Her work can also be found in Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing and Culture, ebr (electronic book review), and Academic Commons.

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