Sheila C. Murphy

Sheila C. Murphy is a theorist and historian of computers and the Internet. She is faculty in the Department of Film, Television & Media and the University of Michigan  Digital Studies Institute. She has taught at the University of Michigan since 2002. She is the author of How Television Invented New Media (Rutgers University Press, 2011, an Association of College and Research Libraries Choice recommended book).

Murphy’s scholarship spans traditional and new media platforms and industries—from the history of art to Atari. She’s written about television, video games, online representations of animals and animality, surveillance technologies, the history of Polaroid, and the rise of the world wide web. Her essays are collected in The Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence (2019, The Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2020 Best Edited Collection), The Video Game Theory Reader 2.0 (2008), and the groundbreaking collection Moving Images: From Edison to the Webcam (2000), in which she wrote about webcams. Her writing has also appeared in The Journal of Visual Culture and Cinema Journal (now The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies). Murphy’s current book project, Terms of Service: Silicon Valley and the Digital Imaginary, examines the history of innovation in Silicon Valley.

Murphy’s writing and courses analyze how digital technologies have historically emerged in relation to everyday life, popular culture, and the history of visuality. She believes students must develop critical literacies around digital media technologies and that doing so can be serious fun. 

Murphy regularly teaches the following University of Michigan courses:

• Introduction to Digital Media Studies
• History of New Media
• History of the Internet
• New Media Theory
• The Visual Culture of Digital Media (first-year seminar)
• Internet of Images (graduate seminar)

UM Affliate:

• UM Computer and Video Game Archive 
• Digital Studies Institute

Field(s) of Study

• Digital Studies
• Media studies
• Digital Visual Culture
• Identity, Power, and Inequality
• Science, Technology, and Society
• Critical Theory
• Video Game Studies