Prof. Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins is one of the world's most prominent media scholars, serving since 2009 as Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism & Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Before, he was Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program for more than a decade. He is author and editor of books on media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. He is currently co-authoring a book on "spreadable media" with Sam Ford and Joshua Green. Jenkins is the principal investigator for Project New Media Literacies (NML), a group which originated as part of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

Comics...and Stuff: Material Culture, Media History, and Graphic Storytelling
Vortrag von Prof. Henry Jenkins, 3. Mai 2012, 18:00 Uhr, Lichtenberg-Kolleg / Historische Sternwarte

Comics are an ideal vehicle for mediating and interpreting our relationship with “stuff” -- both “the stuff of dreams” (Kim Deitch) and “the stuff of our lives” (Seth). When we use the phrase “and stuff” in everyday speech, we mean something vague, something like “Etc.” It’s often seen as a sign of faltering confidence in our own expertise, but “and stuff” is a fascinating phrase because of the ways it links together the material world of things and the kind of emotional “baggage” that becomes attached to them. This talk will draw upon preliminary work which Prof. Jenkins is doing on a new book which examines the work of contemporary graphic novels. In this talk, “stuff” will refer to material culture, old media, historical memories -- the residual of times gone by and media systems since dismantled. Comic authors have been particularly interested in the memory traces which such “stuff” carries with it -- the ways old icons and artifacts embody old values into the presence: offering vehicles through which we sift autobiographical and collective memories, becoming the focus of nostalgic desires and fantasies, and representing the locus of conflicting claims and bids on legacy and tradition.