Henry Jenkins

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Henry Jenkins III (born June 4, 1958 in Atlanta, Georgia) American Scholar, currently Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities and Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program with William Uricchio.

Professor of literature and author of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic, he was one of the first scholars to seriously study the effects of audience participation in media culture. He is recognized as an expert in the influence of digital popular culture on behavior, especially political behavior in a participatory media age.

One of Jenkins' earlier arguments was that the boundary between text and reader has broken down, not merely in the way the reader "constructs" the text (see deconstructionism), but in the growth of fan cultures. These could be seen by how "fan genres grew out of openings or excesses within the text that were built on and stretched, and that it was not as if fans and texts were autonomous from each another; fans created their own, new texts, but elements within the originating text defined, to some degree, what they could do."

More recently, Jenkins' research has been focused on the concept of "Media Convergence", arguing that the simple technological-focused view that was once hyped was short sighted and that an understanding of how individuals in contemporary culture themselves tap into and combine numerous different media sources offers a far richer understanding of the relationship between different media forms. This research led to his 2006 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and the founding of the Convergence Culture Consortium research group at the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT.

He has also written extensively about the effects of interactivity, particularly computer games, and "games for learning", and in this capacity was called to testify before Congress in 1999. This work ultimately led to the founding of the Education Arcade group, also at the MIT Comparative Media Studies program.

He was featured in Electronic Gaming Monthly, where he was asked about the effects of violence in video games. He offered a very different perspective from Jack Thompson.

Jenkins earned his MA in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and his PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He did his undergraduate work at Georgia State University, where he majored in Political Science and Journalism. He and his wife Cynthia Jenkins are housemasters of the Senior House dorm at MIT. They have one son, Henry Jenkins IV.