Lisa Parks

Lisa Parks

Professor, Film and Media Studies
Director, Center for Information Technology in Society
Executive Committee, Center for Nanotechnology in Society
UC Santa Barbara

Lisa Parks, Ph.D. is Professor and former Department Chair of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where she is currently the Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society. Parks has conducted research on uses of media and information technologies in different national contexts, most recently in Zambia. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and engages with fields such as geography, international relations, communication, and art. Parks is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke UP, 2005), Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (forthcoming), and Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies (in progress). She is co-editor of: Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers UP, 2012), and 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. She has delivered invited lectures in more than twenty-five countries and is currently a PI on two major research grants in the fields of ICT4D and Internet Freedom.