I am the Kahl Family Professor of Media Production and a Professor of Film, Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

My teaching and research concentrate on digital media production, the digital humanities, media industries, and the histories of American film and broadcasting.

I am the Director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and Media History Digital Library, which has digitized over 3 million pages of historic books and magazines for broad public access. I also served as the lead developer of Lantern, the MHDL's search platform, and Arclight, a data analytics and visualization app for the MHDL's collection.

My first book Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video (University of California Press, 2014) explores the history of how old movies became valuable. I also co-edited the books Hollywood and the Law (BFI/Palgrave, 2015), The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities (REFRAME, 2016), and Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography (University of Michigan Press, 2021).

My most recent book, Ink-Stained Hollywood: The Triumph of American Cinema's Trade Press, was published in March 2022 by the University of California Press as part of its open access Luminos program. The book is a history of the trade papers that chronicled the early years of Hollywood and spoke to competing factions within the industry.