Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California’s (USC) School of Cinematic Arts. She is an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies and Ethnicity Department, serves on the Gender Studies Advisory Board at USC’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and is the Founding Editor of the journal Vectors as well as the International Journal of Learning and Media. McPherson is the recipient of numerous awards, honors, and grants. The Mellon Foundation in particular has been a major funder for her current research project, the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture project. Her book Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (2003) won the John Cawelti Award for Outstanding Book of 2003 from the American Culture Association. McPherson’s most recent book is Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities, co-authored with Marsha Kinder (2014). Currently, she is preparing the manuscript, The Vectors of Vectors, for Harvard University Press. McPherson is also the lead PI for the software development of Scalar, a new platform for multimodal publication, which moved to open beta in March 2013. Scalar is in process with the Vector’s development team and is supported by the Mellon Foundation. McPherson will serve on the Advisory Board for Project Arclight.