Photo credit: Joel Jares

I’m Whit Pow (they/them). I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.

I am a media historian whose research lies at the intersection of transgender media studies, trans of color critique, electronic art, science and technology studies, and video game and computer history.

My research centers the idea of mediation and media theory to identify the way that the lives and bodies of trans people and people of color are mediated by the state through supposedly "non-representational" media technologies, including bureaucratic documents like passports and birth certificates, immigration ledgers, sign-in sheets as well as medical diagnostic practices and medical imaging like x-rays. My work examines how these processes of documentation, enumeration, and surveillance of trans people and people of color exist today in the oftentimes “invisible” or normalized logics built into computers and computational systems like software, video games, artificial intelligence, and online and networked media.

My first book, Unmediating: A Trans Media History is in press with Duke University Press and will be published in the ASTERISK trans studies book series, edited by Susan Stryker, Eliza Steinbock, Jian Neo Chen, and Marquis Bey. 

My work has been published in Flow Journal, Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Histories, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories, among others. I am a recipient of the Mellon Foundation’s Career Enhancement Fellowship; the NYU Center for the Humanities Fellowship; the ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant for the Trans Games Digital Zine Project, directed by Ari Gass and Teddy Pozo; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Grant for the Queer Play Workshop, directed by Harper B. Keenan, Harris Kornstein, and Ervin Malakaj.

I received my PhD and MA in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University and my BA in English Language & Literature with a double minor in History of Art and Global Media Studies (Film, Television, and Media) from the University of Michigan.