Miriam Posner

Miriam Posner

3318 Rolfe Hall
345 Portola Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095

Miriam Posner

Assistant Professor

Miriam Posner is a digital humanist with interests in labor, race, feminism, and the history and philosophy of data. As a digital humanist, she is particularly interested in the visualization of large bodies of data from cultural heritage institutions, and the application of digital methods to the analysis of images and video. A film, media, and American studies scholar by training, she frequently writes on the application of digital methods to the humanities. She is at work on two projects: the first on what “data” might mean for humanistic research; and the second on how multinational corporations are making use of data in their supply chains.

Positions and Titles

  • Assistant Professor, Information Studies and Digital Humanities

Education

  • Ph.D., Film Studies and American Studies, Yale University, 2011
    Dissertation: “Depth Perception: Narrative and the Body in Medical Filmmaking”
  • B.A., History, Reed College, 2001

Awards, Honors and Fellowships

  • Annual Teaching Excellence Award, Information Studies Department, UCLA, 2017–2018
  • Honorable Mention, Garfinkel Prize for Digital Scholarship, American Studies Association, 2017

Select Publications

  • “Supply chain.” In Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data (Cambridge: MIT, 2021).
  • Klein, Lauren, and Miriam Posner. “Data.” In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, third edition (New York: NYU, 2021).
  • “The Materials at Hand” (with Alison Booth). Proceedings of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) 135, no. 1 (January 2020).
  • “Digital Humanities.” In The Craft of Criticism: Critical Media Studies in Practice, edited by Mary Celeste Kearney and Michael Kackman, 331–46. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2018.
  • “Khaki Fever, Charity Girls, and The End of the Road: Hostile Worlds of Sex and Commerce in an Early Sexual Hygiene Film,” Communicating Good Health: Movies, Medicine, and the Cultures of Risk in the Twentieth Century (University of Rochester, 2018)
  • Posner, Miriam, and Marika Cifor. “Generative Tensions: Building a Digital Project on Early African American Race Film.” American Quarterly 70, no. 3 (September 29, 2018): 709–14.
  • “Tracing a Community of Practice: A Database of Early African-American Race Film” (with Marika Cifor), Moving Image 17.2 (Fall 2017).
  • “The Early African-American Race Film Database” (with Marika Cifor, Hanna Girma, Wiliam Lam, and Shanya Norman), Journal of Open Humanities Data.
  • “Data as Media” (with Lauren Klein), Feminist Media Histories 3:3 (Summer 2017).
  • “What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities,” and “Here and There: Building Community in the Digital Humanities,” in Lauren Klein and Matthew Gold, ed., Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota, 2016).