This is an inaugural symposium, of the Program in Comparative Media at Columbia University. Comparative media refers to an interdisciplinary approach to studying the history and future of media technologies and their place in our aesthetic, technological and social worlds. It decenters our normative understanding of media in three major ways.  First, it returns to the past, to examine previous media revolutions, to see what brought them about, what their effects were, and how key features are present or absent in today's digital media.  Second, it emphasizes how global and cosmopolitan the futures and histories of media have been and will be. Instead of seeing media in China or India as repeating a trajectory first lived in the West, it retheorizes media by paying attention to the specific contexts within which they emerge and are appropriated.  Thirdly, rather than privileging one medium it seeks to examine the intermedial relations between different technologically mediated cultural forms.

This symposium brings together scholars from literature, anthropology, film, architecture, art history music, media theory and other disciplines.

• 6:00pm
  Welcome

  • Welcoming Remarks

    Sharon Marcus

    Columbia University

  • Opening Remarks

    Brian Larkin

    Barnard College, Columbia University

• 6:30pm8:30pm
  Keynote

  • Introduction

    Jane Gaines

    Columbia University

  • Keynote

    Jonathan Sterne

    McGill University

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