Virginia Kuhn is an associate professor in the Division of Media Arts + Practice and associate director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Her work centers on digital rhetoric and the hybrid texts it engenders, those that blur the lines between the factual and the fictive, between word and image, between art and argument. Her current research project, the VAT (Video Analysis Tableau), applies computer vision and crowd-sourced tagging to the analysis of vast filmic archives. Kuhn directs the Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program, the graduate certificate in Digital Media and Culture and teaches a variety of graduate and undergraduate classes all of which marry theory and practice. She joined USC in 2005, after successfully defending one of the first born-digital dissertations in the United States, titled, Ways of Composing: Visual Literacy in the Digital Age and publishes widely in the areas of media studies, digital humanities, rhetoric and technology. Kuhn published the first article created in the multimedia authoring platform, Scalar, titled “Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate,” IJLM, 2010) and co-edited two peer-reviewed digital anthologies published in Kairos: Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy (2008, 2013). She recently co-edited (with Vicki Callahan) a print-based collection titled, Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies (Parlor Press, 2015) and she serves on the editorial boards of several print and digital journals.
