An English literature professor for the first 14 years of my career, I am now Full Professor and Associate Chair of Graduate Studies in the Media Studies Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. I am also Founding Director of the Media Archaeology Lab. My most recent book is Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook (2025). I am also co-author of The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (with Darren Wershler and Jussi Parikka, 2022), author of Reading Writing Interfaces (2014), and co-editor of three collections. My research focuses on uncovering crisis points in past media, or, points at which there was the possibility, never fully realized, for technologies to become “other” than what they are now. I also try to undo established narratives of how contemporary technologies came to be by looking at artists and writers’ experiments with, for example, network technologies. As part of my Other Networks project I describe below, I recently became an amateur radio operator; my callsign is KF0LCB. (My CV, updated in June 2025, is available here.)

white woman with long, straight, dark hair and bangs turning to smile at the camera while she types on a Canon Cat computer in the Media Archaeology Lab
Lori Emerson // photograph by Jenna Maurice

“Other Networks” has been my main research focus for the last five years or so. It is a cluster of projects dedicated to excavating networks that preceded or that exist outside the internet along with artist experiments with and on these networks. It includes Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook (Anthology Editions, 2025); an in-progress book titled The Wire on the Canadian timesharing network IPSAnet and how the three undersea cables the network ran on shaped the artist networks it hosted; another in-progress book titled Slow Networks which documents both the technical specs of pre-internet telecommunications networks and artists’ experiments on these networks; an essay titled “The Net Has Never Been Neutral;” and an interview with internet pioneer John Day titled “What’s Wrong With the Internet and How We Can Fix It.” Through the Media Archaeology Lab, Dr. libi striegl and I also host events and workshops, write recipes and pamphlets on “other networks,” all of which is documented on a standalone website. Finally, I frequently post about other networks on Bluesky Social and on Mastodon using the #othernetworks hashtag.