Elizabeth Losh
Director of Graduate Studies; Duane A. & Virginia S. Dittman Professor of English & American Studies
Office:
Tucker Hall 024 and Samuel E. Jones House 318
Office Hours:
Tuesdays 1-3 Morton 140
Phone:
757-221-3636
Email:
emlosh@wm.edu
Research Interests:
Rhetoric; Digital Publishing; Feminism & Technology; Digital Humanities; Electronic Literature
Education:
Ph.D. English with Critical Theory Emphasis, September 1998, University of California, Irvine
M.F.A. Creative Writing, June 1992, University of California, Irvine
A.B. English (Magna Cum Laude), June 1987, Harvard University
Bio:
Elizabeth Losh is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press, 2009) and The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University (MIT Press, 2014). She is the co-author of the comic book textbook Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013) with Jonathan Alexander.
She has also written a number of frequently cited essays about communities that produce, consume, and circulate online video, videogames, digital photographs, text postings, and programming code. The diverse range of subject matter analyzed in her scholarship has included coming out videos on YouTube, videogame fan films created by immigrants, combat footage from soldiers in Iraq shot on mobile devices, video evidence created for social media sites by protesters on the Mavi Marmara, remix videos from the Arab Spring, the use of Twitter and Facebook by Indian activists working for women’s rights after the Delhi rape case, and the use of Instagram by anti-government activists in Ukraine. Much of this body of work concerns the legitimation of political institutions through visual evidence, representations of war and violence in global news, and discourses about human rights. This work has appeared in edited collections from MIT Press, Routledge, University of Chicago, Minnesota, Oxford, Continuum, and many other presses.
Before coming to William and Mary, she was Director of the Culture, Art, and Technology program at Sixth College at U.C. San Diego, where she taught courses on digital rhetoric and new media. She is also a blogger for Digital Media and Learning Central, and a Steering Committee member of FemTechNet.
