Max Dawson

Department of Radio/Television/Film

Max Dawson joins the faculty of the Department of Radio, Television, and Film having spent the last year as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. A graduate of Northwestern's Screen Cultures PhD. program, Dawson teaches courses on television, new media, digital culture, and video games. His research examines television's fraught relationship to new media technologies, exploring the ways in which innovations ranging from the remote control to the mobile phone have unsettled longstanding notions of television's uses and cultural meanings. He has published articles in the journals Technology and Culture, Convergence, and the Journal of Popular Film and Television, and has contributed chapters to the edited volumes American Thought and Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Columbia University Press, 2008) and Television as Digital Media (Duke University Press, 2010). His current projects include an article on the digital television transition of 2009; co-editing a special issue of the online journal Wi on mobile television; and a manuscript entitled TV Repair which traces the history of television's encounters with new media technologies.

Education

PhD	Screen Cultures, Northwestern University
MA	Media and Communication, University of New South Wales
BA	Modern Culture and Media, Brown University

Recent Publications

"Television's Aesthetic of Efficiency: Convergence Television and The Digital Short," in James Bennett and Niki Strange (eds.) Television As Digital Media (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

"Television Between Analog and Digital," Journal of Popular Film and Television (forthcoming, 2010).

"Television and Digital Media," (coauthored with Lynn Spigel) in Catherine Morley and Martin Halliwell (eds.) American Thought and Culture in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

"Little Players, Big Shows: Format, Narration, and Style on Television's New Smaller Screens," Convergence 13.3 (August 2007).

"Home Video and the 'TV Problem': Cultural Critics and Technological Change," Technology & Culture 48.3 (July 2007).

Recent Conference Presentations

"Between Promos and Content: Renegotiating the Television Text"
The Promotional Surround: AHRC Ephemeral Media Workshop, Nottingham University, Nottingham, UK, July 2009.

"The Object of Television History"
Chicago Film Seminar Symposium on Television History, Art Institute of Chicago, November 6, 2008.

"'Convert Your Mom': Neoliberalism, Generation, and the Visual Culture of the Digital Television Transition"
George Mason University Visual Culture[s] Symposium: "Unthinking Television," Fairfax, VA, March  2009.

"Flow Meets FLO: Mobile Television as a Residual Technology"
Flow Conference on Television Studies, Austin, TX, October 2008.