A University of Wonderful Things

I’ve come to realise that there are all sorts of really interesting people on the USC campus, involved in fascinating work and interesting projects of one sort or another. This is of course true for any university. However, I am still finding pleasant surprises and connections quite regularly. The last major such discovery for me was in the early Summer, when I found out that the excellent writer Aimee Bender (e.g. “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt”), whose work I knew about in a different context, is on the faculty here. (I mentioned this and described her contribution to one of the Categorically Not! events in this post.)

Now I’ve noticed that the hugely popular blog Boing Boing‘s Cory Doctorow is here for the year as the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Visiting Research Chair, which will be co-hosted by the Viterbi School’s Integrated Media Systems Center and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. Obviously I don’t read Boing Boing regularly enough or I would have noticed the increased flux of USC events and other things mentioned there in the last few weeks. Silly me.

Anyway, it’s nice to have another little blog carry the load of telling you a bit about what goes on at USC. So I can relax a little, right?

Here is an article about it on the Viterbi School’s site, from which I quote:

In his new role, announced this week by the Canadian Fulbright Commission, Doctorow will collaborate with USC faculty and students and deliver guest lectures to the wider community.

and further:

“We are excited by this opportunity to work with such a visionary as Cory Doctorow as we continue our research on experiential media for education, journalism and entertainment, ” said Adam Clayton Powell III, director of the Integrated Media Systems Center, an NSF-funded Engineering Research Center within the Viterbi School of Engineering.

Here’s an April post announcing it from Cory himself. There he mentions his connection with Bob Stein’s Voyager company. Who’s Bob, you ask? He and his work was another pleasant discovery I made last year, in the context of academic blogging. He’s Director of research at the Institute for the Future of the Book, at the Annenberg Center for Communication, and also part of the Interactive Media Division. I blogged about meeting him, and the bloggers meeting here and here. It’s a really small world after all.

So, beyond the exciting Visions and Voices events I told you about, there’ll be even more interesting events and talks on campus as a result, no doubt. Here’s one already. Excellent. If only I had more hours in the day…

-cvj