Virginia Kuhn is Associate Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy and Professor in the School of Cinematic Arts, Division of Media Arts + Practice. Her work centers on visual and digital rhetoric, feminist theory and algorithmic research methods. Kuhn’s current research projects include the VAT (video analysis tableau), which applies computational methods to the study of vast filmic archives, and The Library Machine, a gesture-based visual interface for searching library collections. She has published several collections, both digital and book-based. The two books are: Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities (2021, Open Book Publishers, Cambridge UK (with Anke Finger); Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies (2016, Parlor Press). The peer-reviewed digital anthologies include The Video Essay: An Emergent Taxonomy of Cinematic Writing (The Cine-Files, 2016) with Vicki Callahan, MoMLA: From Panel to Gallery (Kairos, 2013) and From Gallery to Webtext: A Multimodal Anthology (Kairos, 2008) with Victor Vitanza.
In 2005, Kuhn successfully defended one of the first born-digital dissertations in the United States, challenging archiving and copyright conventions. Committed to helping shape open-source tools for scholarship, she also published the first article created in the authoring platform, Scalar titled “Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate,” (IJLM, 2010) and she serves on the editorial boards of several peer-reviewed digital and print-based journals. Kuhn was the 2009 recipient of the USC Provost’s award for Teaching with Technology. She directs the undergraduate Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program, as well as the graduate certificate in Digital Media and Culture, and teaches a variety of graduate and undergraduate classes in new media, all of which marry theory and practice.
