Biography
Lisa Parks, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies, Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab, and affiliate faculty in Art and MAT at UC Santa Barbara. She is a media historian and theorist, and her research focuses on satellite technologies and media globalization; critical studies of media infrastructures; media, militarization, and surveillance; environmental media; and digital media technologies and AI. Parks is the author of Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2018) and Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke U Press, 2005). She is co-editor of Media Backends: Digital Infrastructure and Sociotechnical Relations (U of Illinois Press, 2023), Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke U Press, 2017), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois Press, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers U Press, 2012), and Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU Press, 2002). She is currently working on two new books: Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures on the Outskirts and Skyward: A History of SpaceX, Starlink, and Global Satellite Internet. Parks is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and was Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Science and Technology Studies at MIT from 2016-2020.