Anna McCarthy teaches Cinema Studies at NYU and is co-editor of the journal Social Text. Her books include Ambient Television, MediaSpace, and most recently, The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America, out this spring from The New Press.

Her research leans towards unpopular forms of film and television: video screens in public places, reality TV, educational movies, right wing propaganda, stale sitcoms, and experimental psychology films. But this may be changing. She is currently working on two projects: a biography of the filmmakers behind the 1959 underground film classic The Cry of Jazz, and a Swiftian polemic entitled How to Watch TV.

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