We are pleased to share that Dr. Tom McEnaney, Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literature, will serve as the next Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), as of July 1, 2023.
Tom McEnaney will enrich the Berkeley Center for New Media through his expertise in Latin American and sound studies. McEnaney works on the history of media and technology, Argentine, Cuban, and U.S. literature, sound studies, linguistic anthropology, computational (digital) humanities, and new media studies. One of McEnaney’s key contributions will be to draw a focus on Latinx media ecologies, working with the Center for Latin American Studies, to strengthen ties to Latin American users and makers of new media. BCNM will establish this program in the 2023-2024 season with four artists and theorists. In addition, McEnaney will also be focusing BCNM’s attention on interdisciplinary responses to the rise of AI through a collaboration with the Townsend Center for the Humanities. The initial panels will bring together engineers, scholars, artists, and authors from industry and academia to discuss ChatGPT and the Humanities, as well as machine translation (like Google Translate) and literature. With the support of the Indigenous Technologies coordinator, Sierra Edd, McEnaney will also launch a series of Indigenous sound studies events. Under McEnaney’s leadership, BCNM further seeks to embark on its first paid public workshop series. Previously, McEnaney was named a Mellon New Directions Fellow with an emphasis in cultural analytics, and he plans to draw on his knowledge in this field to strengthen BCNM’s contributions to cultural analytics through events and closer alignment with the Digital Humanities.