Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Co-Editor and Press Director

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association. Prior to joining the MLA staff in 2011, she was Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, in Claremont, California, where she was also a member of the extended faculties in Cultural Studies and in Information Systems and Technology at Claremont Graduate University. Kathleen first worked in electronic publishing as a freelance editor during graduate school in the mid-1990s, working on projects for the Voyager Company and Penguin Electronic. She is the author of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, published in 2006 by Vanderbilt University Press, and of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, published by NYU Press in 2011 and reviewed through an open process as MediaCommons Press. She has published articles and notes in journals including the Journal of Electronic Publishing, PMLA, Contemporary Literature, and Cinema Journal, and she is a member of the editorial board of the database anthology Pearson Custom Library: Introduction to Literature. She has blogged at Planned Obsolescence since 2002.

Avi Santo, Co-Editor and Community Director

Avi Santo is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Theatre and Dance at Old Dominion University. Avi received his PhD from the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, where, along with fellow graduate student Christopher Lucas, he started Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture in October, 2004. Flow's mission is to provide a space where researchers, teachers, students, and the public can read and write about and discuss the changing landscape of contemporary media at the speed that media moves. Since its inception, many of the top media scholars in North America have contributed columns, and the journal has become widely known for its insightful, accessible, and provocative scholarship, and for its community-building role amongst those, both inside the academy and beyond, who study the media. Avi also organized the Flow conference on October 26-28, 2006 in Austin, Texas, which was designed to promote discussion amongst scholars, members of the media industries, media activists, fans, and policy-makers over crucial issues related to television and media. After participating in the one-day brain-storming session out at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California on creating an academic digital press, Avi was invited to a follow-up meeting in Brooklyn in June with Kathleen, Bob and Ben, from which emerged plans to develop a scholarly network that could address the future of the academic in a digital publishing environment. The result has been the creation of MediaCommons.

Editorial Board

Richard Edwards, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis 
Jason Mittell, Middlebury College 
Katina Rogers, CUNY Graduate Center
Ethan Tussey, Georgia State University