International lecturers at Digital Culture

After a year with Digital Culture at UiB, Fulbright Scholar Kathi Inman Berens has returned to her home town of Portland. Kathi came to UiB through the Fulbright program, hailing from the University of Southern California, and bringing with her true Californian positivity and a love of teaching and research. An expert on electronic literature, Kathi taught DIKULT203: Electronic Literature, DIKULT103: Digital Genres and DIKULT303: Digital Media Aesthetics.

"Hosting teachers like Kathi is an excellent way of making our students learning experience more international," Daniel Jung explains. Jung is the academic coordinator for Digital Culture. "Digital Culture is an international subject, so we work not only to give our students the opportunity to travel abroad on exchange themselves, but also to bring students and teachers from other countries to UiB. Internationalization isn't just about sending students out. It's also about building an international environment at home."

The Fulbright scholars stay for a full academic year, and become well integrated in the daily workings of the separtment. Other international lecturers also regularly come to Digital Culture to teach into the program's regular courses for shorter periods, often through the ERASMUS teacher exchange program. This spring, Andreas Zingerle from Linz spent a week her, giving et workshop, aresearch presentation and teaching a lecture in DIKULT103.

In addition, Digital Culture has just hired a new Professor 2 from the USA: Mary Flanagan, who is a professor at Dartmouth. Mary has been appointed to a 20%, two year position with Digital Culture at UiB, and will spend a few weeks here each year. Her teaching will mostly be supervision of graduate students, and maybe a few classes in the undergraduate courses.

Kathi will be sorely missed, but luckily she is returning to UiB quite soon as a participant at ELO 2015, the annual international conference of the Electronic Literature Organization which is hosted by the Bergen Electronic Literature Research Group.

When she visits, she'll be able to meet Radhika Gajjala, the 2015/16 Fulbright Scholar at Digital Culture, who will have just arrived. Radhika is professor at Bowling Green State University, and researchers global online cultures with an emphasis on feminist and postcolonial perspectives. She has published a number of books and anthologies on these topics. In the autumn semester of 2015, Radhika will teach into DIKULT106: Culture and Norms in the Information Society and DIKULT302: Key Theories in Digital Culture.