The Graduate Center of the City University of New York announced today that Lev Manovich, a world-renowned innovator in digital humanities and theorist of digital culture and media art, will be joining its faculty in January 2013.

“No one has had a more dramatic impact on the rapidly transforming world of digital humanities than Lev Manovich,” said Graduate Center President William P. Kelly. “Lev’s energy, brilliance, and his collaborative thinking will greatly enhance our digital initiatives. We are delighted that he has chosen to join the Graduate Center, and we look forward to working with him.”

Manovich’s global reputation in digital humanities stems from the tremendous impact of his 2001 book, The Language of New Media, which has been translated into eight languages. One reviewer, William Warner of UC Santa Barbara, called the book “the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.” Manovich’s next book, Software Takes Command, will be published by Continnum in 2013.

In Spring 2013, Manovich’s first course at the Graduate Center, Big Data, Visualization and Digital Humanities, will trace how the explosive growth of social media, combined with the digitization of artifacts by libraries and museums, opens up exciting new possibilities for the study of cultural processes. Students will be introduced to popular open-source tools for data analysis and visualization of large sets of images and video.

“I am very excited about the digital initiatives and grants going on at Graduate Center, and the tremendous pool of intellectual talent in its students and faculty,” said Manovich. “I look forward to all kinds of collaborations, both within the school and with the community of artists, designers, media and software developers. The kinds of collaborations that will happen in New York have the potential to transform how we look at the world at large.”

Professor Manovich’s innovative leadership in digital humanities is also playing a key role in the development of a new field of software studies – the study of how software shapes contemporary societies. In 2007, he founded the Software Studies Initiative (SSI) at UC – San Diego’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Manovich’s research, which will be housed at the Graduate Center, focuses on cultural analytics using computational and visualization techniques to analyze massive cultural data sets and flows. The techniques developed in his lab can be used in digital humanities, art history, cinema studies, game studies, media studies, ethnography, exhibition design, and other fields. Manovich holds a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural studies from the University of Rochester. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Digital Cultures Fellowship from UC–Santa Barbara; a fellowship from the Zentrum für Literaturforschung, Berlin; and a Mellon Fellowship from California Institute for the Arts.