Faculty

Jonathan Burston
Associate Professor
Rogers Chair

North Campus Building Room 213 Phone: 519-661-2111 x88511 University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5B7 Fax: 519-661-3506 Email: jburston@uwo.ca

Teaching
I teach courses on popular music, labour in media capitalism, media and globalization, and the social uses of spectacle in contemporary life. These include MIT 2100 (The Political Economy of Media) , MIT 2350 (Popular Music in Society), MIT 3352 (Music Media and Globalization), and an Honours Seminar on the politics of production in the entertainment industries. At the graduate level I teach in both the Media Studies MA, and FIMS' joint MA in Popular Music and Culture with the Faculty of Music. Courses include MS 9100 (Interdisciplinary Foundations of Media Theory), MS 9102 (The Craft of Writing), MS 9781 (The Social Uses of Spectacle), and PMC 9761 (Space, Place, Music).

Research Interests
My research interests span the same range of topics. They also include, as a subset, the study of performing bodies in digital space and time and, as a super-set, the military-industrial-media complex. So, for instance, I've written recently on the way that 'synthespianism' in Siliwood (Hollywood + Silicon Valley) is blurring boundaries between digital and human actors. Implications big and small are addressed in "War and entertainment: New research priorities in an age of cyber-patriotism," in Daya Thussu and Des Freedman, eds., War and the Media: Reporting Conflict 24/7 (London: Sage, 2003), and in "Synthespians among us: Re-thinking the actor in media work and media theory," in James Curran and David Morley, eds., Media and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge 2006).

Stay tuned for a book on media capitalism's recent impact on Broadway and what I call "the global-industrialization of the live-entertainment economy," forthcoming from Duke University Press. A shorter presentation of my arguments there can already by found in Burston, Jonathan (2009) "Recombinant Broadway." Continuum 23/2: 159-169.

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