Lisa Parks

Lisa Parks is a media scholar exploring the global reach of information technology infrastructures­—such as satellites, internet cables, power poles, and drones—and their cultural, political, and humanitarian implications. Her research concerns both the material and immaterial forces underlying the flow of information and the multilayered relationships between media, technology, and geopolitics. Lisa Parks received a B.A. (1990) from the University of Montana at Missoula and an M.A. (1993) and Ph.D. (1998) from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She was a professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara between 1998 and 2016 before joining the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017, where she is a professor of Comparative Media Studies and director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab.