10 Facts About William Uricchio

William Charles Uricchio is an American media scholar and Professor of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

William Uricchio is founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab.

William Uricchio is series editor of the MIT Press Playful Thinking Series on game related topics.

William Uricchio was Bonnier Visiting Professor of Journalism, Media and Communication at Stockholm University; DREAM Visiting Professor in Denmark; and visiting professor at the Freie Universitat Berlin ; The University of Science and Technology of China ; Philipps-Universitat Marburg ; and Stockholm University.

William Uricchio's work explores how media technologies and cultural behaviors interact and how they are used for purposes of representation, indication, the formation of publics, and power.

William Uricchio uses historical precedent to anticipate the behaviors of the new, and draws upon the new to reveal long overlooked patterns in the historical past.

One portion of his work focuses on television's emergence as an idea and practice in the late 19th century, where William Uricchio argues for a genealogy rooted in the telegraph and telephone rather than photography and film.

William Uricchio has written about the status of non-fiction imagery, focusing on the representation of the city from the actualites and panoramas of early cinema, through city symphonies, to digital urban simulations.

Behind this, as in much of William Uricchio's work, is the idea that the "new" enables the re-evaluation of the old, and the discovery there of overlooked precedent.

The research in interactive documentary and television has led William Uricchio to focus on the media's role in 'pointing out' and 'indicating' rather than only representing.