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November 18, 2008, 03:14 PM ET
Henry Jenkins, Prominent New-Media Scholar, to Leave MIT for U. of Southern California
Henry Jenkins III, co-director of the comparative-media-studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has turned himself into something of an online celebrity by studying online celebrities, and now he’s headed to Hollywood. Today Mr. Jenkins announced on his popular blog that he plans to leave MIT after this academic year to take a position at the University of Southern California.
Mr. Jenkins was one of the first scholars to write about Star Trek fans and about video games, and his work on the intersection of old and new pop-culture media has lead some to call him the the Marshall McLuhan of the 21st century. Mr. Jenkins has spent his whole career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he has helped build a number of unique programs there, including the Center for Future Civic Media, the Convergence Culture Consortium, a video-game lab in Singapore that is co-sponsored by MIT, and Project New Media Literacies.
It’s not clear what will become of all of those efforts, though in his blog post Mr. Jenkins said that “some of them will gradually move towards the west coast with me while others are deeply rooted at MIT and will continue to operate under different leadership.”
Mr. Jenkins said that he was leaving in part out of exhaustion — he had been running all of those programs with the help of only two full-time faculty members (along with the help of students). “I’m often asked how I manage to do everything I do and now you know the sad answer: I can’t — at least not year after year,” he wrote on the blog. “Even Green Lantern needs to recharge his ring now and again.”
He also said that the University of Southern California had “offered me a truly interdisciplinary position, one which straddles the Communications and Cinema Schools and which is designed to encourage collaboration and conversation between their diverse faculty.”
I spent a day with Mr. Jenkins last year while researching a Chronicle profile of him (and I accidentally broke his collectible wax cylinder). I was struck by the juggling act he was doing — and his tireless commitment to the programs and his students. He seemed like the busiest person on campus, but he also seemed to love all the facets of his job. It will be interesting to see whether he actually slows down in his new position or if he simply uses new resources to further extend his personal academic brand. —Jeffrey R. Young
Categories: Research
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