Richard Grusin was named Center director starting with the 2010-11 academic year and is a Professor of English at UWM.

Professor Grusin received his Ph.D. from the University of California–Berkeley, and has held faculty appointments at the College of William and Mary, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Wayne State (where he chaired the Department of English from 2001 to 2008). He brings an outstanding record of institutional service and interdisciplinary scholarship to UWM, and is the author of four books:

Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible (Duke, 1991), which concerns the influence of European (primarily German) theories of biblical interpretation on the New England Transcendentalists

Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999), co-authored with Jay David Bolter, which sketches out a genealogy of new media, beginning with the contradictory visual logics underlying contemporary digital media

Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks (Cambridge, 2004), which focuses on the problematics of visual representation involved in the founding of America’s national parks

Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), which argues that in an era of heightened securitization, socially networked US and global media work to pre-mediate collective affects of anticipation and connectivity, while also perpetuating low levels of apprehension or fear.