About
Sheila C. Murphy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures and is the Program's digital media scholar. Murphy received her B.A. in Art History from the University of Rochester and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California , Irvine . She has worked as the Assistant Director of the UC-Irvine Film & Video Center and served on the Society for Cinema and Media Studies' information technology committee. She is currently working on a book-length study of the emergence of online images, entitled View-masters, Doodles, and Devices: The Emergence of Internet Visuality.
The politics of identity and representation underlie my scholarly approach and interest in computer culture and technology studies. From teletubbies to cybernetics, television to "convergence," net.art and hacking, I'm interest in visual discourse of and cultural rhetoric about how, why, when and where we use computers and incorporate them into our everyday life.
I've taught at Michigan since 2002 and I'm especially proud of my work with our undergraduate program. I've worked with our CRLT ( http://www.crlt.umich.edu/ ) to develop new media pedagogical tools and collaborated with folks at the Duderstadt Center's GROCS program ( http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/GROCS/). Some of my former students now make video games while others study online cultures in doctoral programs. I'm rigorously committed to the idea that understanding media is simultaneously serious, crucial, fun (yes, fun) and a necessary literacy for the 21 st century.
Research/Teaching Interests: digital media theory, visual culture, television, video games, the Internet, wireless telecommunications, the visuality of the world wide web, identity politics, identification/spectatorship.
Professional Affiliations: Member of Society for Cinema and Media Studies, SCMS special interest group in Video Game Studies, Chair of the Anne Friedberg Award Committee (SCMS)
Select Publications:
Murphy, Sheila C. How Television Invented New Media. Piscataway: Rutgers UP, 2011.
“Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds by Jesper Juul.” Cinema Journal 48:3 (Spring 2009), 142-44.
" 'This is Intelligent Television': Early Video Games & Television in the Emergence of the Personal Computer.” The Video Game Theory Reader 2.0 eds. Mark Wolf and Bernard Perron, Routledge (2009).
"Unlimited Minutes: Playing Games in the Palm of Your Hand” Playing the Past ed. Zack Whalen and Laurie Taylor, Vanderbilt University Press ( in press ).
"Live in your world, Play in ours": The Spaces of Video Game Identity." Journal of Visual Culture 3.2 (2004).
"Converging Channels (of Discourse): Linking Between Televisual and Digital Networks." Strategies: A Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics . 14: 1 (May 2001): 139-147.
"Lurking and Looking: Webcams and the Construction of Cybervisuality." Moving Images: From Edison to the Webcam , edited by John Fullerton and Astrid Söderbergh-Widding. London and Sydney : John Libbey & Company, 2000. 173-180.
(updated 8-10-2011)
