Tara McPherson is Professor and Chair in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, Director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Studies, and Faculty Chair of Visions and Voices. She is author of Feminist in a Software Lab (Harvard University Press 2018) and Reconstructing Dixie (Duke 2003), co-editor of Hop on Pop (Duke 2003) and Transmedia Frictions (California 2014), and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected (MIT 2008.) Her scholarship engages the cultural dimensions of media with a particular interest in digital media. Here, her research focuses on the digital humanities, early software histories, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship. Her current book project investigates the use of online platforms in the spread of hate and white supremacy. She was Founding Editor of the pioneering multimedia journal Vectors and is lead PI of the online platform, Scalar. She has received funding from the Mellon, Ford, Annenberg, and MacArthur Foundations, as well as from the NEH.