Lisa Parks, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor and former Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she serves as Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab. She was previously a Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Science, Technology, and Society at MIT.
Parks is a media scholar whose research focuses on three areas: satellite technologies and global media; critical studies of media infrastructures; and media, militarization, and surveillance. She is the author of Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2018) and Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke University Press, 2005). She is co-editor of Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke University Press, 2017), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (University of Illinois Press, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries, and Cultures (Rutgers University Press, 2012), and Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU Press, 2002). In addition, she has authored numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.
Parks is currently working on two new books: Media Backends: Digital Infrastructure and the Politics of Knowing (under contract with University of Illinois Press), co-edited with Julia Velkova and Sander de Ridder, and Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures on the Outskirts.
A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, Parks has also held fellowships and visiting appointments at the International Research Center for Cultural Techniques & Media Philosophy (IKKM) at Bauhaus University, Weimar; the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin; McGill University; the University of Southern California; and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a principal investigator on major grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of State and has collaborated with artists, geographers, sociologists, and computer scientists.
Parks is committed to exploring how a greater understanding of media systems can inform and assist citizens, scholars, and policymakers in the U.S. and abroad to advance campaigns for technological literacy, creative expression, and social and environmental justice. She is active within the UC system, serving on the Board of Governors of the UC Humanities Research Institute and chairing the Senate Council on Faculty Welfare, Academic Freedom, and Awards at UC Santa Barbara.
