Helen J Burgess

Editor, Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures

About me:

I'm an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where I teach in the communications & technology major.

My vita is here. Some screen snaps of my visual work are here. My teaching statement is here.

Here are some things I'm working with:

1. Interactive media (screen shots here).

my dissertation, Highways of the Mind (2003, WVU) was executed in multimedia format with archival video content. There's a mirror here.
I am coauthor of Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars (penn press), which was published in 2001.
I am also coauthor of Biofutures: Owning Body Parts and Information (website here), which has just been published with Penn Press and received $38,000 in grant funding last year from a private biotech consortium.
my next project is Futurama, Autogeddon: Imagining the Superhighway from the World's Fair to the World Wide Web (proposal here).

2. Web scholarship. I am editor and coordinator of Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures (ISSN 1555-9351). The fifth issue of this online new media/net art journal is going live in late July. I'm also technical editor for Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge (ISSN 1555-9998). This journal is internationally known and has been online since 2000.

3. Issues in academia. I'm working on a book with Jeanne Hamming on the place of new media scholarship as a mode of academic inquiry. In particular, I'm interested in how definitions of genre and scholarship impact researchers wishing to work with or study new media. I'm also interested in the implications of the current "copyright wars" for academic scholarship.

4. Cultural studies. Currently I'm doing work on American superhighways, science fiction, and women astronomers.

5. Instructional technology. I've used Blackboard, WebCT, and designed and taught an online web scripting class with Moodle, which is an open-source teaching tool. And of course I've taught f2f classes: intro web design, usability, communications, and digital diversity.

6. Nerd. Although I'm an English professor, I can hack XHTML, CSS and PHP/mySQL. I've installed a MOO, set up a server, built a wiki and taught with blogs. I'm also a strong believer in Open Source and Open Content. I single-handedly keep Apple Computer in business.

You can email me at helen@burgess.net.