Lisa Parks, PhD will be visiting Media@Mcgill in March 2009.  She is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her research explores uses of satellite, computer and television technologies in a transnational context. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke University Press 2005) and co-editor of Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU Press 2003) and Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Duke UP, 2007). She has published essays in numerous books and in journals such as Screen, Television and New Media, Journal of Visual Culture, Convergence, Ecumene: A Journal of Cultural Geography, Social Identities, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video.  She is also co-producer of media arts projects such as Experiments in Satellite Media Arts with Ursula Biemann (2002), Loom with Miha Vipotnik (2003), Postwar Footprints (2005), Roaming (2008), and participated in the Object of Media Studies project led by Amelie Hastie (2006). She has been a co-investigator in internationally funded projects including the Missing Links Project (UCSB-Utrecht) and the Transcultural Geography Project (Zurich-Cologne-Ljubljana). Parks sits on the editorial boards of Cultural Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Film Quarterly, The Velvet Light Trap, Mediascape, and e-media, and is director of the Global Cultures in Transition research initiative for the Center for Information Technology and Society at UCSB. She is currently writing a new book called Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies and was a research fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg of Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study) in 2006-2007.