Marita Sturken is Professor and former Chair of the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at
New York University's
Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, where she teaches courses on
cultural studies,
visual culture,
popular culture,
cultural memory, and
consumerism. She focuses primarily on visual culture and the politics of cultural memory in American culture. Before coming to NYU she was an
associate professor at the
Annenberg School for Communication at the
University of Southern California. She has published essays in
Representations, Public Culture, Social Text, Afterimage, Journal of Visual Culture, Memory Studies, International Journal of Communication, American Ethnologist, History and Theory, and
Positions, and was the editor of American Quarterly from 2003-2006. She has a Ph.D. (1992) from the
History of Consciousness program at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. In the 1980s and 1990s, she was a critic of independent film and video. She is author of
Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (2007), and
Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (1997), and co-author of
Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2001; Second Edition, 2009). While working as a critic in the 1980s she wrote a series of articles for
Afterimage magazine documenting the early history of
video art and community video. ==Works==