Ellen Sebring, Ph.D., will be joining the department as a post-doctoral associate this year. She was creative director of the Visualizing Cultures project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from its inception in 2002. Her research investigates “visual narrative” as an emerging digital historiographic form that addresses the mass digitization of archives now opening an unprecedented global portal to the past. The research—at the crossroads of history, digital data, and interactive design—asks how the narrative art of history transforms in a digital-cum-visual age. She is working towards a uniquely digital visual syntax with images themselves as grammatical elements.



Sebring received a master’s degree and was a fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, participating in its collaborations as a video artist. She earned a Ph.D. at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Integrative Arts at Plymouth University in the U.K., and has published articles on authoring with images, digitality, and remembrance.

She will be teaching a course on Visualizing Cultures: History and Images in the Digiverse this fall semester.