McLuhan Centenary visiting fellows
The Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto is pleased to announce that five communications and media experts have been selected as the first recipients of the McLuhan Centenary Visiting Fellowships with the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. This signifies a revitalization of the previously unpaid fellowship program.
Dr. Dimitris Gkinosatis, Dr. Paolo Granata, Dr. Stephen Kline, Dr. Eric McLuhan and Dr. Daniel Robinson will spend up to a half-year exploring the future, past, and present of Marshall McLuhan’s influential theories. The fellows will interact with faculty and students by lecturing at the iSchool's Colloquium Series, giving talks based on their research, hosting workshops, and participating in conferences.
Renamed in honour of McLuhan’s birth 100 years ago on July 21, 1911, the fellowships are now awarded to academics instead of students, and provide each recipient with $10,000 over the course of their residency at the University of Toronto.
The McLuhan Program, housed at the Faculty of Information (also known as the iSchool), wanted to expand the program globally. “As part of our efforts to revivify the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the famed Coach House, we wanted to emphasize that McLuhan’s legacy is greater than just a retelling of his work,” says Professor Seamus Ross, Dean of the iSchool.
The research being undertaken
Dimitris Gkinosatis
Dr. Gkinosatis is a Lecturer in Philosophy & Media Aesthetics at the Athens School of Fine Arts. For the past fifteen years, his work has focused on injecting human sciences perspectives to the 'hard' sciences of communication and information technologies. More recently, his research and lecturing have been oriented towards a form of epistemology, where philosophy meets the scientific theories and technologies of aesthetic perception. The research project he will be pursuing involves the examination – in philosophical-epistemological terms—of the deep changes brought about in the field of traditional theoretical and historical study of artworks (mainly images) by the extensive use of advanced information technologies and innovative scientific methods.
Paolo Granata
Dr. Granata is professor of Digital Catalogues for Cultural Heritage at the University of Bologna, and Multimedia for Cultural Heritage at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. His main books are Arte in Rete (2001), Videoart Yearbook (2009), Arte, estetica e nuovi media (2009). His current research is focused on the relationships between art, aesthetics, and new media. Though one of McLuhan’s main achievements was exploring the relationship between media and the senses, little attention has been played to how McLuhan’s aesthetological approach could be applied as a tool to assess and understand the evolution expressions of contemporary art. Dr. Granata’s project aims to fill this gap by addressing the historical, theoretical and phenomenological aspects of the subject.
Stephen Kline
Stephen Kline is a Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, and the Director of the Media Analysis Laboratory. His research focuses on audience practices, community media education, advertising and consumerism, video game policy debates, children’s food and toy marketing, and family consumption dynamics. During his Fellowship, Dr. Kline will be working on a half-hour documentary on media-saturated family life in Canada exploring relation between the patterns of children’s sedentary lifestyles, food consumption and their consumer socialization.
Dr. Eric McLuhan
Dr. McLuhan will be researching the grand renaissance of the 19th-20th centuries based on the premise that no one appears to realize that we have been immersed in an enormous renaissance for the last century and a half. He says that perhaps it's not surprising inasmuch as it usually takes those involved in a renaissance a century or more to realize that that is where they have been. The fact does account for the strange social and cultural hubris that has been our lot during that time.
Daniel Robinson
Daniel Robinson is Associate Professor and Rogers Chair in Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. He has edited two books on communication history in Canada, both of which discuss McLuhan’s scholarship. During his stay in Toronto, Dr. Robinson will be working on two journal articles, one on the impact of Harold Innis’ Empire and Communications on later historical and communications scholarship for the Italian journal Contemporanea, the other on the influence of McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride on the field of advertising studies in North America. He will be completing a book manuscript that examines the marketing/advertising of controversial goods, and corresponding social/political regulation throughout the 20th century. He will be designing a graduate-level course on communication history in North America.
McLuhan100 events
The iSchool is hosting or partnering with a number of organizations such as the City of Toronto and Mozilla, over the course of the year to offer various McLuhan100 events that celebrate McLuhan’s contributions. Events include an international academic conference (November 7-10), Doors Open Toronto (May), and exhibitions at the University of Toronto Art Centre, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, and McLuhan's Coach House, on now. Beginning on October 17, and continuing biweekly until November 28, the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology resumes the Monday Night Seminars entitled The Edge of Academe, at the University of Toronto’s legendary McLuhan Coach House.
“The celebratory events are meant to infuse the city with McLuhan’s edgy spirit, and to raise awareness in young minds about McLuhan's works, and incite them to play with the ideas he probed. The McLuhan100 Committee believes that Toronto should be a place of the mind,” says Dr. Dominique Scheffel-Dunand, Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology.
About the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology
Created for Marshall McLuhan in 1963 as the Centre for Culture and Technology, the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, affectionately known as 'The Coach House,' has been part of the Faculty of Information since 1994. Fifteen years later, the iSchool launched the Coach House Institute (CHI). Directed by Professor Brian Cantwell Smith, the institute is a clearly defined research unit under which the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology now operates.
