Steve Anderson

With great sadness, iMAP mourns the untimely death of its founding faculty member Anne Friedberg. Anne’s passing comes as a hard blow to the iMAP program, which was conceived and launched on her initiative and vision in 2007, but it is equally a loss for the field of media studies as a whole. At the time of her cancer diagnosis a little over a year ago, Anne was the Chair of USC’s program in Critical Studies, President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and a few months from being honored as an Academy Film scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to produce a work of digital scholarship on Slavko Vorkapich. Her exhaustively researched book The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft appeared the year before from MIT Press, followed soon after by a companion digital media project The Virtual Window Interactive, created in collaboration with designer Erik Loyer. The completion of these two projects coincided with Anne’s conception and inauguration of the iMAP program and it’s hard to imagine that her experience translating nearly a decade of research and written scholarship into an interactive, media-rich form did not contribute to her thinking about iMAP and the potentials of exploring emerging modes of scholarship. Anne helped select and mentor two cohorts of iMAP students but more importantly she served as the program’s intellectual center of gravity, challenging students and faculty alike to pursue the highest levels of scholarly rigor even as we seek new modes of creative expression. We have missed her guidance for the past year and will continue to feel her absence profoundly and in ways that are impossible to articulate in the years ahead.