Whitney Pow

Assistant Professor, Queer & Transgender Media Studies

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Whitney (Whit) Pow is an Assistant Professor of Queer and Transgender Media Studies in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. They received their MA and PhD in Screen Cultures in the Department of Radio, Television, and Film from Northwestern University, and their BA in English Language and Literature, History of Art, and Global Media Studies from the University of Michigan.

Pow is a media studies scholar, historian, and game designer whose research focuses on queer and trans histories of video games, software, and computational media. Their current book project locates queer and transgender video game designers and programmers in histories of early software and hardware development, looking at the intersection of queer and trans medical history, surveillance, and policy with computer and video game history. Pow’s work has been published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories, The Velvet Light Trap, and the Oxford University Press reader Gendered Lives: Intersectional Perspectives, edited by Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey. Their most recent interactive art piece, Digital TV Breakfast, was exhibited at Ars Electronica as a part of the art exhibition Chicago New Media 1973-1992.

Pow received the Presidential Fellowship from Northwestern University and the Dissertation Fellowship from The Sexualities Project at Northwestern, in addition to research fellowships from The University of Chicago’s Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and The Strong National Museum of Play.