Henry Jenkins is the co-Director of the MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twelve books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Jenkins writes regularly about media and cultural change at his blog, henryjenkins.org. He is one of the principal investigators for The Education Arcade, a consortium of educators and business leaders working to promote the educational use of computer and video games and of the Knight Center for Future Civic Media, a joint effort with the MIT Media Lab to use new media to enhance how people live in local communities. He is one of the principle investigators for GAMBIT, a lab focused on promoting experimentation through game design, and of Project NML, a MacArthur Foundation funded project that develops curricular materials focused on promoting the social skills and cultural competencies needed to become a full participant in the new media era. Jenkins has an MA in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

William Uricchio is Professor and co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, and professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He has held visiting professorships at Stockholm University, the Freie Universität Berlin, and Philips Universität Marburg, and is particularly interested in comparative national constructions of media, trans-national content flows, and the ways that media are drawn upon for identity purposes in European and American cultural settings. Between 2000-2005, he led a five-year cultural identity project within the Changing Media Changing Europe initiative of the European Science Foundation. His broader research, supported by Guggenheim, Fulbright and Humboldt research awards, considers the transformation of media technologies into cultural practices, and their role in (re-) constructing representation, knowledge and publics. His current work takes up these issues by considering collaboration and collective identities in peer-to-peer communities, their relations to cultural citizenship, and their implications for new forms of cultural production. His forthcoming books include Media Cultures, on responses to media in post 9/11 Germany and the US, and Media and New Collectivities in Europe, on the relationship between media for identities, and he is completing a manuscript on the concept of the televisual from the 17th century to the present.

Joshua Green is Research Manager of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT, where he is also a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Comparative Media Studies program. Green leads a team of researchers exploring the changing media landscape and the ramifications of convergence and participatory culture for content production, advertising and branding practice, and the way we understand media audiences. His current research looks at changing understandings of what television 'is', the formation of the participatory audience, and television branding in the context of participatory culture. He has published work on participatory culture and the relationship between producers and consumers, television scheduling strategies, the history of Australian television, and the construction of the cultural public sphere. His forthcoming book (with Jean Burgess) about the uses of YouTube will be published by Polity in 2008. Green holds a PhD in Media Studies from the Queensland University of Technology.

Eleanor Baird is a Master's of Business Administration (MBA) Candidate, Class of 2008, at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She joined the Consortium in February 2007, where her work to date has been focused on audience measurement, engagement, and social networking research. In Fall 2007, she was a Teaching Assistant for Sloan's introductory graduate-level management communications course. Her research interests include business models and strategy for media companies, media metrics, and network television branding. During the summer of 2007, Eleanor interned with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, where she developed new media strategies for stations and conducted analyses of growth opportunities in niche programming markets and the financial development of the public television system. Prior to Sloan, she held positions in communications, organizational development, research, and marketing in the public and private sectors. Originally from Canada, Eleanor holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto, where she specialized in Political Science.

Before coming to MIT, Ana Domb Krauskopf worked as a journalist, producer and arts manager in her native Costa Rica. Ana's work has always revolved around the creative industries. In 2003, she collaborated with film historian María Lourdes Cortes to create Cinergia, the first film production fund designed to stimulate media activity in Central America and Cuba, and coordinated the project until June 2007. She has also worked with the Papaya Music label in research, marketing, corporate sales, fundraising, public relations and concert and CD production. In early 2006, she co-produced the Papaya Fest, the first Central American music festival, with Luciano Capelli. This large-scale event involved more than 70 musicians and diverse styles ranging from Belizean rap, to Costa Rican acid jazz and Panamanian pop. Ana's research interests include alternative distribution and consumption of creative goods and how they relate to the production process.

Xiaochang Li completed a BA at New York University in 2006, where she wrote an undergraduate thesis on narrative structure in Proust's In Search of Lost Time while also exploring various aspects of media production through internships in film production, publishing, and web design and advertising. She then spent the interim year in Germany on fellowship through the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, where she spent her time working with independent film production firms in Berlin and Saarbrücken and going 220km per hour on the autobahn.

Her current research interests include the emergence of narrative forms in the digital landscape that shift our understanding of, and interaction with, the structure of texts and the relationships of gender and sexual performativity between Eastern and Western media through the lens of fan-generated content. In the future, she hopes to see Roland Barthes resurrected from the dead to author a book about YouTube that consists entirely of a series of semi-related Cat Macros.

Esteve Olle is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he also works with the Convergence Culture Consortium on a research project about the changing structure of media organizations. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open University of Catalonia, with a focus on the uses of new media in public organizations. He has also worked as an e-governance freelance consultant for several European institutions. Before coming to MIT, Esteve spent three years doing research on globalization theory at the London School of Economics. He has published articles on these and other topics, and his first book, which is about the uses of new media in Barcelona's City Council, will be published in 2008. His current research looks at the nature, convergence practices (production/reception), and sociocultural processes involved in new television products that claim a strong relation with social/scientific knowledge.

Nancy Baym is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas, where she teaches about communication technology, interpersonal communication and qualitative research methods. She pioneered the study of online community and fandom in the early 1990s, writing about how soap opera fans built relationships with one another while transforming television viewing into a collaborative endeavor. Her book Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Sage, 2000) synthesizes that work. Her recent publications include "The New Shape of Online Community: The Case of Swedish Independent Music Fandom" in First Monday, as well as articles in New Media & Society, The Handbook of New Media, and The Information Society. With Annette Markham, she is co-editor of Internet Inquiry: Conversation about Method (forthcoming from Sage), a book examining how exemplary qualitative researchers manage the challenges raised when studying the internet. She is currently studying the "friend" relationship in the music-oriented social network site Last.fm and writing a book, Personal Connections in a Digital Age, about digitally-mediated community, relationships and social networks for Polity Press. She was a co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and served as its President. She blogs at OnlineFandom.com.

Abigail (Gail) Derecho is currently on faculty at Columbia College Chicago, in the Program in Cultural Studies. In Fall 2008, she will join the faculty of UC Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in The Berkeley Center for New Media and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies. She researches intersections of minority discourse with artistic appropriations, especially digital appropriations such as sampling, online fan productions, game mods, and audio and visual mash-ups; Internet piracy and "torrent culture"; narrative serializations in digital contexts; and "techno-orientalism," or Hollywood sci-fi's equation of futuristic technologies with Asia and Asianness. In June 2008, she will be awarded her Ph.D. by Northwestern University's Program in Comparative Literary Studies and the Department of Radio/Television/Film. Her dissertation, "Illegitimate Media: Race, Gender, and Censorship in Digital Remix Culture" argues that digital remix was largely invented by African Americans and Anglo American women, and that Culture Wars-era debates over representations of race and sex severely constrained these nascent cultural forms. Her article "Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction" appears in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, and she is currently co-editing a volume on soap operas, Searching for Soaps' Tomorrow, with Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington. She can be reached at abigail.derecho@gmail.com.

David Edery is the former Associate Director for Special Projects for the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, during which time he worked closely with the Consortium. He is now the "Worldwide Games Portfolio Planner" for Xbox Live Arcade. David also contributed to the growth of CMS' game design curriculum, and managed Cyclescore, an exertainment project fusing original video games and stationary exercise equipment. David received his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he concentrated on marketing and entrepreneurship. Prior to receiving his MBA, David worked as a software engineer and founded a successful software development and consulting firm. He received his BA in English Literature from Brandeis University.

Published articles on Gamasutra include "Enhancing the Effectiveness of In-Game Advertising" in December 2005; "Designing an MMORPG Feedback Rating System" in February 2006; and "In Defense of Episodic Content" in April 2006. He published "The Producer Pay Question" in March 2006 and "Games as Lifestyle Brands" in June 2006 for Next Generation. He also published "Reverse Product Placement in Virtual Worlds" for Harvard Business Review.

Jonathan Gray is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. He is currently working on two books for NYU Press, one about film and television "paratexts" – all those things that surround film and television, from games to trailers, spinoffs to spoilers, toys to hype, reviews to fan creations – and the other a co-edited collection (with Jeffrey P. Jones and Ethan Thompson), Satire TV: Comedy and Politics in a Post-Network Era. Other books: Television Entertainment (Routledge, 2008); Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality (Routledge, 2006); Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (NYU Press, 2007), edited with Cornel Sandvoss and C. Lee Harrington); and Battleground: The Media (Greenwood, 2008), an encyclopedia of media hot-button issues, edited with Robin Andersen. His research examines the interactions of entertainment media and audiences, with particular interest in parody and satire, transmedia storyworlds, and the changing nature of "television." He has degrees from University of British Columbia (B.A. in English), University of Leeds (M.A. in Literature from Commonwealth Countries), and Goldsmiths College, University of London (M.A. and Ph.D. in Media and Communication Studies). Jonathan writes at The Extratextuals and can be reached at jongray@fordham.edu.

C. Lee Harrington is Professor of Sociology and Affiliate of the Women's Studies Program at Miami University. Her areas of research include television studies, fan studies, and the sociology of law. Her long research collaboration with Denise D. Bielby has focused on the daytime soap opera genre, its audiences and fans, and its global circulation. Their joint work includes Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Everyday Life (1995, Temple U. Press), the edited collection Popular Culture: Production and Consumption (2001, Blackwell), and an in-press book on global television distribution titled Global TV: Exporting Television and Culture in the World Market (2008, NYU Press). She also recently co-edited an anthology on fandom aptly titled Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (2007, NYU Press; with Jonathan Gray and Cornel Sandvoss). Harrington has also published on issues of sexual representation on television in Feminist Media Studies and Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. Current research projects include a study of acting and aging on daytime soaps, and a study of media framing of death row volunteers (inmates who want to be executed). She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Ted Hovet teaches American Studies, film studies, and composition at Western Kentucky University. He has recently published on early film exhibition, pedagogy, and film adaptation. He currently researches the emergence of the screen as the "default" site for image display in the late nineteenth century and the continued dominance of this method of display across various media today. He is also investigating the pedagogical issues involved in the introduction of new technologies into educational settings and the application of concepts of fair use in the classroom. His PhD is from Duke University (1995). He is currently researching for a project on "Framing Motion: Containing the Image in Early Cinema and Beyond".

Publications include "Harriet Martineau's Exceptional American Narratives: Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, and the 'Redemption of Your National Soul," in American Studies, Spring 2008; "The Teacher as Exhibitor: Pedagogical Lessons from Early Film Exhibition", published in Vol. 6 Issue 2 of Pedagogy in 2006; "The Invisible London of Dirty Pretty Things; Or, Dickens, Frears, and the Film Today," in Vol. 4 Issue 2 of Literary London in September 2006; and "The Case of Kalem's Ben-Hur (1907) and the Transformation of Cinema," in Vol. 18 Issue 3 of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video in August 2001.

Derek Johnson is a PhD Candidate in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His dissertation examines the historical development of the media "franchise" as a form based on shared intellectual property networks, as a specific set of production and consumption practices, and as a discourse used to make sense of media culture. Interested in the organization of culture across media platforms, his research spans a wide range of industries (including film, television, video games, comics, and licensed merchandising) and encompasses issues of narrative theory, audience reception, public sphere discourse, as well as media economics and policy. His recent publications include "Inviting Audiences In: The Spatial Reorganization of Production and Consumption in 'TVIII'" (New Review of Film and Television, 2007), "Fan-tagonism: Factions, Institutions, and Constitutive Hegemonies of Fandom" (Fandom: Identities and Communities in Mediated Culture, edited by Gray, Harrington, and Sandvoss, 2007), and "Will the Real Wolverine Please Stand Up?: Marvel's Mutation from Monthlies to Movies" (Film and Comic Books, edited by Gordon, Jancovich, and McAllister, 2007).

Robert V. Kozinets is an Associate Professor of Marketing at York University's Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. An anthropologist by training, he previously was a full-time faculty member at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison's School of Business. He has extensive speaking and consulting experience with a range of Fortune 500 and mid-size companies, including eBay, Peipsico, Interrep, and IBM. He developed and continues to expand the technique of netnography, or Internet ethnography, for the marketing-related study of online communities, blogs, social networking sites, and virtual worlds. His research on word-of-mouth marketing, brand management, fandom and entertainment, community marketing, prosumer Web 2.0 strategies, technology, and retailing has been published in journals such as the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Advertising Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, the Journal of Retailing, as well as more than two dozen other books and proceedings. That work includes "E-Tribalized Marketing? The Strategic Implications of Virtual Communities of Consumption" in Vol. 17 Issue 3 of the European Management Journal (pp. 252-264); "Teaching Old Brands New Tricks: Retro Branding and the Revival of Brand Meaning" in Vol. 67 of the Journal of Marketing in July 1999 (pp. 19-33). He writes regularly at Brandthroposophy, his blog.

Recent publications include "Technology/Ideology: How Ideological Fields Influence Consumers' Technology Narratives," forthcoming in 2008 for the Journal of Consumer Research and "Netnography 2.0," which was published in Russell W. Belk's Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing in 2006 (pp. 129-132). Consumer Tribes, the book Robert co-edited with Bernard Cova and Avi Shankar, was published in 2007. The book includes Kozinets' essay "Inno-tribes: Star Trek as Wikimedia" (pp. 191-211) and "Tribes, Inc.: The New Paradigm of Consumer Tribes" (pp. 3-26), co-written with Cova and Shankar.

Amanda D. Lotz is an assistant professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York University Press, 2007), in which she examines the institutional adjustments of the U.S. television industry since the 1980s on the medium's role as a cultural institution and Redesigning Women: Television after the Network Era (University of Illinois Press, 2006), which explores the rise of female-centered dramas and cable networks targeted toward women in the late 1990s as they relate to changes in the U.S. television industry. She also has published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Feminist Media Studies, Media, Culture & Society, Communication Theory, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Television & New Media, Screen, Journal of Popular Film and Television, and Women and Language.

Amanda is currently working on an edited collection that brings together established television scholars writing new chapters in their areas of expertise that reconsider how programming forms other than prime-time series (such as sports, news, soap operas, and made-for-television movies, among others) have been affected by the wide-ranging industrial changes instituted over the past twenty years. She also has an emerging project exploring men and masculinity in contemporary television dramas and is in the preliminary stages of developing an ethnographic study of new patterns of television use. Amanda has participated in many media industry programs for academics, such as the NATPE Faculty Fellow and Faculty Development Grant Programs, AEF Visiting Professor Program, and the ATAS Faculty Seminar, and has been involved in consulting activities with Competing Values and NBCU owned-and-operated stations.

Grant McCracken holds a PhD from the University of Chicago in cultural anthropology. He is the author of Big Hair, Culture and Consumption, Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning and Brand Management, Flock and Flow, The Long Interview, Plenitude: Culture by Commotion, and the forthcoming Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture. He has been the director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum), a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School, a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge and he is now an adjunct professor at McGill University. He has consulted widely in the corporate world, including the Coca-Cola Company, IKEA, Chrysler, Kraft, Kodak, and Kimberly Clark. He is a member of the IBM Social Networking Advisory Board.

Jason Mittell is an Assistant Professor of American Civilization and Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College. His book – Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge, 2004) – offers a new approach to exploring television genres as cultural categories as utilized by television industries and audiences. He is currently writing a new book on contemporary developments in American television narratives and how they intersect with shifts in the television industry, media technology, and audience practices. He is also consulting with Initiative Media on the use of micro-genre categories by television audiences. His research areas include television history and criticism, animation and children's media, genre and narrative theory, taste cultures and media, and new media studies & technological convergence. He has received degrees from Oberlin College (B.A. in Theater and Literature) and University of Wisconsin – Madison (Ph.D. in Communication Arts).

Aswin Punathambekar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. His research and teaching revolve around globalization, culture industries, new media and media convergence, public culture, and cultural identity. He has published articles in Biblio, International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Velvet Light Trap. Aswin has just finished co-editing an anthology on Bollywood for NYU Press, called Mapping Bollywood: Media, Culture, and Identity in a Global World, which includes an essay from him entitled "'We're Online, Not on the Streets': Indian Cinema, New Media, and Participatory Culture." He also has an essay in Michael Curtin and Hemant Shah's Reorienting Global Communication, entitled "It's All About Loving Your Family: Bollywood, Globalizatoin, and the Reconstruction of the Indian 'National Family.'" He is now writing a book on the emergence of Bollywood as a key site of mediation between India and the Indian diaspora over the past decade, paying particular attention to how convergence between film and new media has shaped the production, circulation, and consumption of Bollywood content in varied contexts worldwide. He is a graduate of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT holds a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Aswin writes at BollySpace 2.0 and can be reached at aswinp@umich.edu.

Doris C. Rusch holds a postdoctoral position with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in the Programme at Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Before that she did postdoctoral work at the Institute for Design and Assessment of Technology at Vienna University of Technology. In her habilitation project titled "Once More with Meaning," Rusch investigates the medium specific characteristics of digital games and their potential to produce a wide range of emotionally satisfying and deeply meaningful experiences. Although her work is theory-driven, she aims at applicability of her research to actual game design with the goal of pushing the boundaries of games as media. Rusch has an eclectic background having completed studies in German Literature, Philosophy, English and Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna, where she also received her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics. Her work in computer game studies is part of a larger interest in "narrative worlds" that expand over books, comics, and films.

Kevin S. Sandler is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University. His research specializations include contemporary U.S. Media, film and television censorship, and production cultures. His book The Naked Truth: Why Hollywood Does Not Make X-Rated Films (Rutgers, 2007) examines the productive and prohibitive practices of the Classification and Ratings Administration. His forthcoming books include Scooby-Doo (Duke University Press), an analysis of the cartoon's uncanny ability to adapt to regulatory, technological, and industrial changes over its 38-year-old history, and The Shield, a study of the FX cop drama. He has published in a wide range of journals and anthologies and is the editor of Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner Bros. Animation (Rutgers, 1998), and co-editor of Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster (Rutgers, 1999). He earned a B.A in Communication from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, an M.A. in Radio/TV/Film from Indiana State University, and a Ph.D. in Film Studies from Sheffield Hallam University in England.

He recently published "Life Without Friends: NBC's Programming Strategies in an Age of Media Clutter, Media Conglomeration, and TiVo," for Michele Hilmes' NBC: America's Network and will shortly publish "Directing Race on Television: An Interview with Paris Barclay," for Daniel Bernardi's anthology Filming Difference.

Parmesh Shahani the former research manager for the Consortium, is currently based in Bombay, India, where he works on venture capital, innovation, and strategic brand outreach for the Mahindra Group. His other work experiences include founding India's first youth website Freshlimesoda, business development for Sony's Indian television channel operations, writing and editing copy for Elle magazine and The Times of India newspaper, helping make a low-budget English feature film, and teaching as a visiting faculty member at a Bombay college. He holds undergraduate degrees in commerce and education from the University of Bombay, and a graduate degree in Comparative Media Studies, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Recently, Shahani helped organize the Mahindra Universe education program at Harvard Business School and the Mahindra Indo American Arts Council Film Festival in New York. He also conceived and executed a company-wide entrepreneurship initiative at Mahindra with participation from more than 600 Indian employees. He may be reached at parmesh@mit.edu.

Forthcoming publications include Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love, and (Be)longing in Contemporary India, from Sage Publications; "The Mirror Has Many Faces: Reading Identity/Representational Politics Underlying Two Seminal Indian Works on Male Same-Sex Desire," in Andy Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar's The Bollywood Reader; and "Mobile India: Glimpses and Opportunities," which will appear in an anthology from the March 2007 Mobile Nation Conference in Toronto.

Shenja van der Graaf is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen and is also conducting research at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research focuses on the organization and management of innovation and technology, especially demand-side innovation, product development, and media uses in media and software industries. Over the years she has worked with an extensive international network of companies including Hakuhodo, Valve, and Ericsson.

Recent and forthcoming publications include "Media Literacy," which she co-wrote with Sonia Livingstone for The International Encyclopedia of Communication in 2007; "The Second Life of Analogue Players in a Digital World," which she co-wrote with Garrett Cobarr in Alex Koohang and Keith Harman's 2007 book Knowledge Management; "Your Second Life: ComMODifying Inventory Toolkits," under review for the International Journal of Knowledge, Culture, and Change Management; "The Mod Industries? The Industrial Logic of Non-Market Game Production," which she co-wrote with David B. Nieborg for a 2008 issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies; and "Spill Over Practices of Virtual Markets: The ComMODification of Inventory Toolkits," which will appear in Japanese in 2008.

Christopher Weaver received his SM from MIT and was the initial Daltry scholar at Wesleyan University, where he earned dual Masters Degrees in Japanese and Computer Science and a CAS Doctoral Degree in Japanese and Physics. The former Director of Technology Forecasting for ABC and Chief Engineer to the Subcommittee on Communications for the US Congress, he later founded Bethesda Softworks, a leading software entertainment company that is credited with the development of physics-based sports sims and creating the original John Madden Football for Electronic Arts and the well known Elder Scrolls Role Playing series. An advisor to both government and industry, he is a technology columnist for NextGen Magazine and holds patents in interactive media and broadband communications dealing with seminal telecommunications engineering. A former member of the Architecture Machine Group and Fellow of the MIT Communications and Policy Program under Ithiel de Sola Pool, Weaver was previously a Fellow of the Robotics Simulation Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon and currently teaches part time as a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies Program and is a Communications Technology Roadmap Member and Visiting Scientist in the Microphotonics Center. He is currently acting CTO of Blockbuster. Inc.

Stefan Werning has written on topics ranging from e-learning solutions based on digital games, modelling terrorism in recent military policies to interactive media analysis, his MA thesis which won him the Ambassor's Award of the US Embassy in 2004. Apart from writing finishing his PhD thesis in late 2007, he worked as a stand-in assistant professor for media studies and as an associate lecturer at the Asian Studies Center in Bonn. Other professional experiences include leading a project group at the Fraunhofer Institute Media Communications (IMK) and doing project assistance for Codemasters Germany. Stefan is a member of the working group 'computer games' at the German Association for Media Studies (GfM). As of March 2007, he is working at the product analysis department of Nintendo of Europe.

Recent publications include: "Pixel Pashas, Digital Djinns: Orientalist Representations in Digital Games," which he co-wrote with Philipp Reichmuth in Vol. 18 of ISIM Review in 2006, pp. 46-47; "Some Ontological Considerations on the Destruction of Cities in Interactive Media and its Discursive Repercussions," in Andreas Böohn and Christine Mielke's 2007 book Die Zerstäsentationen urbaner Räume von Troja bis Sim City, pp. 311-338; reviews of "America's Army" and Kuma War" in Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, and Matthias Böttger's 2007 book Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture, and Urbanism; and "The Convergent Use of Programmable Media for Terrorism Modeling and Social Simulations in Civilian vs. Military Contexts," in Rolf Nohr and Serjoscha Wiemer's 2007 book Strategie Spielen.

Stacy L. Wood is Moore Research Fellow and and an associate professor of marketing at the University of South Carolina. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Florida. Her research focuses on how consumers react and adapt to change; her work investigates both individuals' processing of new product information, drivers of individual innovativeness, and consumers' emotional reactions to new innovations, media, trends, and rituals. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and Journal of Retailing. She is a co-recipient of the 1997 H. Paul Root Award (for the article published in Journal of Marketing that was judged to have "made the most significant contribution to the advancement of marketing practice" and the 2005 AMA Louis W. Stern Award (for the "outstanding article on marketing channels and distribution" published in Journal of Marketing). She is a member of the editorial review board for Journal of Consumer Research and was named a Young Scholar in 2005 by the Marketing Science Institute. Dr. Wood has also won a number of teaching awards including, in 2007, the Mungo Award, the top undergraduate teaching award at the University of South Carolina.

Recent publications include: "Paradox and the Search for Authenticity through Reality Television," which she co-wrote with Randall Rose for the Journal of Consumer Research in September 2005; "From Fear to Loathing? Emotional Responses to Innovative Products, which she co-wrote with C. Page Moreau in the July 2006 Journal of Marketing; Predicting Happiness: How Normative Feeling Rules Influence (and Even Reverse) Durability Bias," which she co-wrote with James R. Bettman for the July 2007 Journal of Consumer Psychology; "Effects of Online Communication Practices on Consumer Perceptions of Performance Uncertainty for Search and Experience Goods, which she co-wrote with Daniel Weathers and Subhash Sharma in the Journal of Retailing in 2007; and "Consumer Testimonials as Self-Generated Advertisements: Evaluative Reconstruction Following Product Usage, which she co-wrote with Terence A. Shimp and Laura Smarandescuin the Journal of Advertising Research in 2007.

Ivan Askwith is a 2007 Master of Science graduate from the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, where he was a graduate researcher for the Consortium. A frequent contributor to such publications as Salon.com, Askwith writes on issues at the intersection of media, technology, culture, and entertainment. His work while at MIT focused on television, alternate reality gaming, social networking, and viewer engagement. He previously worked with best-selling author Steven Johnson as a researcher for Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (Riverhead, 2005). Askwith has worked as a freelance designer and consultant for almost a decade and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Technology and Media Culture from NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He is currently a creative strategist for Big Spaceship, a digital creative agency based in Brooklyn, NY.

Alec Austin is a 2007 Master of Science graduate from the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, where he was a graduate researcher for the Consortium. Austin's work at C3 focused on how commercial concerns, ads, and product placement affect the content of (and audience reactions to) TV, movies, and new media such as videogames and weblogs. Alec's critical work has been published in a variety of venues, including The New York Review of Science Fiction, Strangehorizons.com, and Savantmag.com, the last of which he co-founded. He holds a BA in Mathematics from Reed College, and has written three novels. Austin is currently a technical designer for Electronic Arts in Los Angeles.

Sam Ford is a research affiliate with the Convergence Culture Consortium and Director of Customer Insights for Peppercom, a PR agency, in their Manhattan office. Ford was previously the Consortium's project manager and part of the team who launched the project in 2005. He holds a Master of Science degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT (2007) and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Western Kentucky University (2005), where he majored in English (writing), news/editorial journalism, mass communication, and communication studies, with a minor in film studies. Ford has taught courses on professional journalism, pro wrestling, and soap operas at MIT and WKU and has published work on these and other areas of U.S. popular culture and television. His work focuses on media audiences and immersive story worlds. Ford has also worked as a professional journalist, winning a Kentucky Press Association award for his work with The Greenville Leader-News and publishing a weekly column entitled "From Beaver Dam to Brooklyn" in The Ohio County Times-News. He also blogs for Peppercom's Pepper Digital. He can be reached at samford@mit.edu.

Geoffrey Long is a Researcher and Communications Director for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. He is also a writer, designer, musician, artist, filmmaker, and shameless media addict. His professional career includes a decade-long run as the editor-in-chief of the literature, culture and technology magazine Inkblots and co-founding the software collective Untyped, the film troupe Tohubohu Productions, and the creative consulting company Dreamsbay. Geoffrey earned his BA in English and Philosophy with concentrations in Creative Writing and IPHS from Kenyon College in 2000 and his Master's in Comparative Media Studies from MIT in 2007. He is a frequent lecturer on narratives in different media, including transmedia storytelling, and his own storytelling has appeared in Polaris, Gothik, Hika, {fray} and the iTunes store. His personal website/portfolio can be found at geoffreylong.com. Email him at glong at mit dot edu.

Ilya Vedrashko is a 2006 Master of Science graduate from the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, where he was a graduate researcher for and one of the founding members of the Consortium. Vedrashko's Master's thesis focused on advertising in computer games. His academic and professional interests focus on identifying new advertising channels within and outside of the existing media structures. He keeps a record of his findings at the Advertising Lab blog. Ilya came to the department from the Sofia office of Grey Worldwide where he managed accounts for Procter & Gamble, HBO and Wyeth. He spent a summer at Fallon interning as an analyst for the agency's interactive department and now works across the Charles River at Hill Holliday as an emerging media strategist. Ilya's undergraduate degree in political science and business administration is from the American University in Bulgaria. His personal website is at vedrashko.com.