Lynn Spigel

Lynn Spigel

Fellow: Awarded 2012
Field of Study: Architecture, Planning and Design

Competition: US & Canada

Northwestern University

Lynn Spigel is a Professor in the Department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University. She earned her Ph.D. at UCLA’s Department of Film and Television in 1988, where she began her investigations into the cultural history of media, technology, and gender. Her first book, Make Room for TV (University of Chicago Press, 1992), explores the cultural history of television and postwar suburbs, examining the ways in which television became a family medium in the 1950s. Her subsequent book, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Duke University Press, 2001), continues to explore mid-century media and  the changing landscapes of everyday life in the 1950s and 1960s. Her most recent book, TV By Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (University of Chicago Press, 2009), focuses on the significant but virtually forgotten links between commercial television and the visual arts during the cold war. Spigel’s current scholarship focuses on the history of smart homes and digital technologies for everyday life, tracing contemporary smart homes back to twentieth-century modern architecture and design history. In addition to her books, she has co-edited numerous anthologies, most recently Electronic Elsewheres: Media the Experience of Social Space (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Duke University Press, 2004). She is currently the series editor for the Console-ing Passions and Spin-offs book series at Duke University Press. Spigel work’s has been translated into Japanese, Spanish, French, German, and Polish, and she lectures at a range of international universities.

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