Rate My Professor Erica Robles-Anderson

Erica Robles-Anderson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Trained as both an experimental psychologist and a cultural historian, she holds a Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University in 2009 and a B.S. from Stanford University in 2001. Prior to her position at NYU Steinhardt, she served as a Research Fellow in New Media and Architecture with joint affiliation in the Department of Culture and Media and the Humanities and Technology Laboratory (HUMlab) at Umeå University in Sweden.

Robles-Anderson’s research focuses on the role media technologies play in the production of space, particularly configurations that enable a sense of public, collective, or shared experience through the structuring of visibility and gaze. She employs a range of methodologies to explore the definition of media-space and is currently writing a book entitled Mediating Eternity: The Crystal Cathedral and the Architecture of Mediated Congregation under contract with Yale University Press, which examines the 20th-century transformation of Protestant worship space into a highly mediated, spectacular mega-church. Her key publications include “The Crystal Cathedral: Architecture for Mediated Congregation” (Public Culture, 2012), “‘One Damn Slide After Another’: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech” (Computational Culture, 2015, with Patrik Svensson), “Coupling Complexity: Ecological Cybernetics as a Resource for Non-Representational Moves to Action” (in Sustainable Media, Routledge, 2016, with Max Liboiron), and “From Materials to Materiality: Thinking of Computation from within an Icehotel” (Interactions of the Association for Computing Machinery, 2011, with Mikael Wiberg). She serves as co-editor-in-chief of the journal Public Culture alongside Arjun Appadurai. Robles-Anderson was a recipient of the 2023-24 Leonore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.