Tara McPherson is Professor of Cinema & Media Studies in the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study. She is a core faculty member of the MAP program, USC’s innovative practice-based PhD, and also an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department. Her scholarship engages the cultural dimensions of media, including the intersection of gender, race, affect, and place. She has a particular interest in digital media. Here, her research focuses on the digital humanities, early software histories, gender, and race, as well as upon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing, learning, and authorship.

McPherson's most recent book is Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design (2018). Her Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (2003) received the 2004 John G. Cawelti Award for the outstanding book published on American Culture, among other awards. She is co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (2003) and of Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, The Arts + the Humanities (2014), and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, part of the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning (2008).

McPherson is the lead PI on the authoring platform Scalar and for the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. Her research has been funded by the Mellon, Ford, Annenberg, and MacArthur Foundations, as well as by the NEH. She is the founding editor of Vectors, a multimedia peer-reviewed journal affiliated with the Open Humanities Press, and was a founding editor of the MacArthur-supported International Journal of Learning and Media (MIT Press.)  She is a widely sought-out speaker on the digital humanities, digital scholarship, digital media, and feminist technology studies. McPherson was among the founding organizers of Race in Digital Space, an early initiative addressing issues of race, technology, and computation She served on the advisory board of the Mellon-funded Scholarly Communications Institute, has frequently served as an AFI juror, and is a core board member of HASTAC.