Henry Jenkins

Referring to Gilbert Seldes' Seven Lively Arts (1924) which championed the aesthetic merits of popular arts often frowned on by critics who embraced high art to the exclusion of popular art, Jenkins dubbed video games "The New Lively Art" and argued that it was a crucial medium for the growing rise of digital interactive culture.

Jenkins brings a humanist interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on, for instance, cultural studies and literary studies.

Jenkins' interest in vaudeville theater and popular cinema was an early focus of his research career - his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Wisconsin explored how the comedy performances of American vaudeville influenced comedy in 1930s sound films, such as those of the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, and Eddie Cantor.

Henry Guy Jenkins III (born June 4, 1958) is an American media scholar and Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

He also has a joint faculty appointment with the USC Rossier School of Education.

Previously, Jenkins was the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities as well as co-founder and co-director (with William Uricchio) of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He has also served on the technical advisory board at ZeniMax Media, parent company of video game publisher Bethesda Softworks.

Jenkins's doctoral dissertation, "What Made Pistachio Nuts?": Anarchistic comedy and the vaudeville aesthetic (1989) was supervised by David Bordwell and John Fiske.

The dissertation became the basis of his 1992 book What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic.

A key argument of Jenkins' scholarship here was that vaudeville placed a strong emphasis on virtuoso performance and emotional impact which contrasted sharply with the focus of classical Hollywood cinema on character motivation and storytelling.

Jenkins' approach was partly inspired by cultural commentators who believed that early cinema was unfairly treated by skeptical commentators of its era because it was a rising new popular culture medium.

It was also influenced by scholars of film aesthetics such as David Bordwell.

This approach would later help shape Jenkins' scholarly appreciation of video games as another rising popular culture medium attracting much criticism.

Jenkins, long a fan of comics, is also a scholar of the medium and it continues to be one of the key topics of his academic writing and speaking.

Jenkins' interest in comics ranges from superhero comics to alternative comics.

His academic publications includes work on comics by Brian Michael Bendis, David W. Mack, Art Spiegelman, Basil Wolverton, Dean Motter, amongst others.

In 1999, Jenkins founded the Comparative Media Studies master's program at MIT as an interdisciplinary and applied humanities course which aimed "to integrate the study of contemporary media (film, television, digital systems) with a broad historical understanding of older forms of human expression.... and aims as well for a comparative synthesis that is responsive to the distinctive emerging media culture of the 21st century."

The same ethos can be found in Jenkins' research across various forms of media.

Examples of video game topics he has written extensively about include the gendering of video game spaces and play experiences, the effects of interactivity on learning and the development of educational video games (this work led to the creation of the Microsoft Games-To-Teach initiative at MIT Comparative Media Studies in 2001 which in 2003 became the Education Arcade initiative, a collaboration with the University of Wisconsin. ); and game design as a narrative architecture discipline.

Jenkins' role in the video game violence debate has attracted particular public attention.

He has been an advocate of a cultural studies approach to understanding media depictions of violence, arguing that "There is no such thing as media violence — at least not in the ways that we are used to talking about it — as something which can be easily identified, counted, and studied in the laboratory. Media violence is not something that exists outside of a specific cultural and social context.".

Jenkins has also called for a culturally focused pedagogical response to these issues.

Jenkins' views criticizing theories (such as Jack Thompson's argument) that video games depicting violence cause people to commit real-world violence have also been described in mainstream video game publications such as Next Generation, Electronic Gaming Monthly and Game Informer magazines.

One of Jenkins' most well-known concepts has been his "transmedia storytelling", coined in 2003 which has become influential not just within academia but also in media arts and advertising/marketing circles and beyond.

Jenkins has defined transmedia storytelling as so:

Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.

Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.

Transmedia storytelling, Jenkins writes, is "the art of world-making", "the process of designing a fictional universe that will sustain franchise development, one that is sufficiently detailed to enable many different stories to emerge but coherent enough so that each story feels like it fits with the others"; and crucially, these different stories or story fragments can be spread across many different media platforms encouraging users engaged in the story experience to explore a broader media ecosystem in order to piece together a fuller and deeper understanding of the narrative.

He and his wife Cynthia Jenkins were housemasters of the Senior House dorm at MIT before leaving MIT for the University of Southern California in May 2009.

They have one son, Henry Jenkins IV.

Jenkins' academic work has covered a variety of research areas, which can categorized as follows:

Jenkins' media studies scholarship has focussed on several specific forms of media - vaudeville theater, popular cinema, television, comics, and video games - as well as an aesthetic and strategic paradigm, transmedia, which is a framework for designing and communicating stories across many different forms of media.

In general, Jenkins' interest in media has concentrated on popular culture forms.

In 2013, he was appointed to the board that selects the prestigious Peabody Award winners.

In December 2015, it was reported by Microsoft Research New England's Social Media Collective (where Jenkins was a visiting scholar at the time), that Jenkins was working on new book focused on comics.

Jenkins' research into video games was influenced by his prior interest in the debates around emerging popular culture media forms as well as his parallel interest in children's culture.

Jenkins has authored and co-authored over a dozen books including By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (2016), Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (2013), Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006), Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992), and What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (1989).

Beyond his home country of the United States and the broader English-speaking world, the influence of Jenkins' work (especially his transmedia storytelling and participatory culture work) on media academics as well as practitioners has been notable, for example, across Europe as well as in Brazil and India.

Jenkins graduated from Georgia State University with a B.A. in Political Science and Journalism.

He then earned his M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and his Ph.D. in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.