Marita Sturken is a scholar, author, professor, and critic.

Marita Sturken is Professor and Chair of the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University

New York University

New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, where she teaches courses on cultural studies

Cultural studies

Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural...

, visual culture

Visual culture

Visual Culture as an academic subject is a field of study that generally includes some combination of cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, and anthropology, by focusing on aspects of culture that rely on visual images.- Overview :...

, popular culture

Popular culture

Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...

, cultural memory

Cultural memory

For other approaches see Memory and Culture As a term, cultural memory was first introduced by the German Egyptologists Jan Assmann in his book "Das kulturelle Gedächtnis", who drew further upon Maurice Halbwachs’s theory on collective memory...

, and consumerism

Consumerism

Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen...

. She focuses primarily on visual culture and the politics of cultural memory in American culture. Before coming to NYU she was an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication

Annenberg School for Communication

There are two schools named Annenberg School for Communication.*University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism*Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania...

 at the University of Southern California

University of Southern California

The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...

. She has published essays in Representations, Public Culture, Social Text, Afterimage, Journal of Visual Culture, Memory Studies, International Journal of Communication, American Ethnologist, History and Theory, and Positions, and was the editor of American Quarterly from 2003-2006. She has a Ph.D. (1992) from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In the 1980s and 1990s, she was a critic of independent film and video.

She is author of Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (2007), and Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (1997), and co-author of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2001; Second Edition, 2009). While working as a critic in the 1980s she wrote a series of articles for Afterimage magazine documenting the early history of video art

Video art

Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data. . Video art came into existence during the 1960s and 1970s, is still widely practiced and has given rise to the widespread use of video installations...

and community video.

Works

• Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007)
• Co-Author (with Lisa Cartwright) of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; Second Edition, 2009).
• Co-editor (with Douglas Thomas and Sandra Ball-Rokeach) of Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004).
• Thelma & Louise (London: British Film Institute, 2000)
• Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)