Megan is a PhD candidate in Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. She earned her Masters degree in Communications, Culture, and Technology from Georgetown University. Her dissertation, “Dot-com Design: Cultural Production of the Commercial Web in the Internet Bubble (1993-2003),” examines web design practices in the dot-com era as a shifting set of assumptions about how a website should (or should not) look, sound, function, and behave; how it should be built; and how users should interact with it.  As advertising agencies, interactive shops, and e-commerce consultancies jockeyed for control of a new industry and image-making professionals competed for work, pay, and prestige, the discourses and assumptions that signified “quality” web design were constantly in flux.  This project explores these discursive shifts by analyzing how power struggles among industry sectors and creative workers relate to the web’s visual culture.

Megan's publications include “Industries, Economies, Aesthetics:  Mapping the Look of the Web in the Dot-com Era,” in Web History. Ed. Niels Brügger.  Aarhus: Peter Lang. (Forthcoming.); and “Historicizing Web Design: Software, Style, and the Look of the Web,” in Convergence Media History. Eds. Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake.  New York: Routledge. 191-203. She also co-founded and edited the new media poetry journal Poems that Go (www.poemsthatgo.com) from 2000-2004. She was awarded a University Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School, Arts & Humanities in May 2009 and was a College of Letters and Sciences Teaching Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison Letters & Sciences in 2006.