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Jenkins’ Farewell: Reflections on a Career at MIT

Henry Jenkins: April 22, 2010; Running Time: 1:39:03

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

In conversation with William Uricchio, Henry Jenkins returns to reflect on his time at MIT and offers insights into MIT’s culture, his new life at USC, and the state of digital cultures, new media and collective intelligence.

Jenkins shares that complex feeling of loving and hating MIT, at the same time and often within the course of one day. Providing his own insights into MIT’s culture and the legacy of IHTFP, he looks back on a long career and the evolution of film and media studies into the Comparative Media Studies program we know today. He attributes his longevity at MIT to the inspiration provided by the students, and makes a strong case for the value of humanities education, while questions remain for some on how the humanities fit into an MIT education.

The reflection ends with Jenkins reading The Cat in the Hat—his annual salute to Dr. Seuss. This tradition, began 18 years ago, became a staple of IAP. Jenkins says he is reminded “how much it characterizes to me that creativity and imagination, which is so vital at MIT, and that we turn our back on at our own peril.”

Lecture Details

Location: Bartos

“I lived in the dorms and every dorm room had books in them. And the books that survive when you have tight space are books that are valued. And some of them might be graphic novels, and some might be science fiction, and some might be Middlemarch.”

Henry Jenkins

About the Speaker

Henry Jenkins

Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts
University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

Henry Jenkins joined USC from MIT, where he was Peter de Florez Professor in the Humanities. He directed MIT’s Comparative Media Studies graduate degree program from 1993-2009, setting an innovative research agenda during a time of fundamental change in communication, journalism and entertainment.

As one of the first media scholars to chart the changing role of the audience in an environment of increasingly pervasive digital content, Jenkins has been at the forefront of understanding the effects of participatory media on society, politics and culture. His research gives key insights to the success of social-networking Web sites, networked computer games, online fan communities and other advocacy organizations, and emerging news media outlets.

Jenkins is recognized as a leading thinker in the effort to redefine the role of journalism in the digital age. Through parallels drawn between the consumption of pop culture and the processing of news information, he and his fellow researchers have identified new methods to encourage citizen engagement. Jenkins launched the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT to further explore these parallels.

He is the author and/or editor of twelve books on various aspects of media and popular culture. His most recent book is Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

Jenkins has a B.A. in Political Science and Journalism from Georgia State University, a M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.