Lisa Parks, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor and former Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she serves as Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab. She was previously a Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. Parks is a media scholar whose research focuses on three areas: satellite technologies and global media; critical studies of media infrastructures; and media, militarization, and surveillance. Parks is the author of Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2018), Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke U Press, 2005). She is co-editor of 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).  In addition, she is the author of many peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, which can be found here: https://ucsb.academia.edu/LisaParks

Parks is currently working on two new books, Media Backends: Digital Infrastructure and the Politics of Knowing (under contract with University of Illinois Press), co-edited with Julia Velkova and Sander de Ridder, and another entitled, Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures on the Outskirts.

Parks is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and has held other fellowships and visiting appointments at the International Research Center for Cultural Techniques & Media Philosophy (IKKM) at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, McGill University, University of Southern California, and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a PI on major grants from the National Science Foundation and the US State Department and has collaborated with artists, geographers, sociologists, and computer scientists. She is committed to exploring how a greater understanding of media systems can inform and assist citizens, scholars, and policymakers in the US and abroad to advance campaigns for technological literacy, creative expression, and social and environmental justice. Parks is active within the UC system and serves on the Board of Governors of the UC Humanities Research Institute and Chairs the Senate Council on Faculty Welfare, Academic Freedom, and Awards at UC Santa Barbara.