Tara Brabazon

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Tara Brabazon (3 January 1969 -) is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Brighton, Great Britain. Born in Perth, Western Australia, she has previously held a number of academic positions in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, including Associate Professor in the School of Media, Communication and Culture at Murdoch University and lectureships at Central Queensland University and at the Victoria University of Wellington.

Known as a "digital dissenter" and cultural historian, she has published nine books. Her best known monographs are Digital Hemlock: internet education and the poisoning of teaching (2002) and The University of Google (2007), which both focus on building an information scaffold for students managing the information age. She has also written extensively on popular culture, and in 2005, published From Revolution to Revelation: Generation X, Popular Culture, Popular Memory and edited Liverpool of the South Seas: Perth and its popular music. Calling attention to the interplay between nation, identity, representation and popular culture, Tracking the Jack: a retracing of the Antipodes (2000) and Playing on the Periphery: sport, memory and identity (2006), investigate the historical iterations of culture and iconography between the United Kingdom and the Antipodes. More recently, The Revolution will not be downloaded: dissent in the digital age was published in January 2008, and Thinking Pop: war, writing and terrorism is being published by Ashgate in June 2008.

A finalist for Australian of the Year in 2005, she has also won awards for postgraduate supervision, disability education and teaching excellence. In 1998, Brabazon received the Australian Award for University Teaching (Humanities). She is also a public commentator on cultural and political issues, and is currently a features writer for the Times Higher Education (THE). She has previously published feature articles in both The Times and The Guardian.

Brabazon is also Director of the Popular Culture Collective, a not for profit community organization whose stated goals are to "create thinking - and thoughtful - popular culture."^[1] She is married to Steve Redhead, who is also a Professor at the University of Brighton.

Brabazon currently teaches two first year courses at the University of Brighton: Creative Industries and Thinking Pop. She is also the Program Leader of the Master of Arts in Creative Media and runs four masters courses on campus and through distance education: City Imaging, Media Literacies, Sonic Media and Teaching, Learning and Writing through Popular Culture. She received some media and online coverage for 'banning' students on her courses from using Google and Wikipedia in their first year of study.^[2] Her Inaugural Address at the University of Brighton was titled "Google is White Bread for the Mind."^[3]