Virginia Kuhn serves as associate director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, and associate professor of cinema practice in the School of Cinematic Arts. She directs an undergraduate Honors program, oversees faculty in the IML Digital Studies minor and teaches a variety of graduate and undergraduate classes in new media, all of which marry theory and practice. She joined USC in 2005 after successfully defending one of the first born-digital dissertations in the United States, challenging archiving and copyright conventions. Her dissertation, Ways of Composing: Visual Literacy in the Digital Age, was created in TK3, the precursor to the USC-based, open source, media-authoring program, Sophie. Committed to helping shape open source tools for scholarship, she recently published the first article created in the authoring platform, Scalar. “Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate,” appeared in the International Journal of Learning and Media, she just completed editing her second peer-reviewed digital anthology titled, MoMLA: From Gallery to Webtext, and co-authored a chapter in Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Policies and Politics, which was published by the pioneering UK-based scholarly press, Open Book Publishers.

Kuhn’s most recent work centers on large-scale video analytics: With an award from the National Science Foundation’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, her multi-institutional team is creating processes to harness machine analytics and crowd-sourced tagging, in order to make sense of the massive video archives that characterize contemporary culture, and grow on a daily basis. She was the 2009 recipient of the USC Provost’s award for Teaching with Technology, she co-chairs the Scholarly Interest Group on Media Literacy and Pedagogical Outreach for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and she serves on the editorial boards of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, PRE/TEXT: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory and The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. Her work can be found in many of these journals, as well as in Transformative Works and Cultures, Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing and Culture, ebr (electronic book review), Academic Commons and a variety of codex-based publications.