Vicki Mayer, Ph.D.

Vicki Mayer, Ph.D., is Professor of Communication at Tulane, where she researches media production and consumption in relation to economic and political transformations in media and creative industries. Her students act as co-researchers of cultural labor and creative expression in a variety of community-based settings. Her goal as an SE professor is to continue to develop ways of bringing student and community voices into the public sphere through collaborative research, digital preservation, and open access. To this end, she has launched several digital humanities initiatives, most recently ViaNolaVie, a magazine of life and culture in New Orleans. Designed with students and community members over a two-year period, the site showcases student work on the community and freelance writers and artists in the community. When completed, the website will provide public access to thousands of locally-based stories generated over the past decade and will continue to add more than one hundred stories by Tulane students yearly. Her own research has been made available through open access channels, including Jump Cut, The Columbia Journalism Review, and Public Culture. Her most recent book on the lure of local film economies and the transformation of New Orleans is available as a free download via UC Press.

Mayer is a Carnegie Fellow and held the Louise and Leonard Riggio Professorship from 2014-2019.