Tom McEnaney Named the 2025–2028 craigslist Distinguished Chair in New Media

We are thrilled to announce that Tom McEnaney has been named the 2025–2028 craigslist Distinguished Chair in New Media.

The Chair was donated by craigslist.com in recognition of BCNM's "long tradition in facilitating the technical and cultural advances on which modern society depends" and its position in "illuminating the exponentially expanding opportunities and impacts of new media across a host of disciplines."

As the craigslist chair, McEnaney will support his ongoing scholarship at the intersections of media history, sound studies, and literature of the Americas, while continuing the interdisciplinary work he has built as BCNM's outgoing Director.

McEnaney's research has long traced the entangled histories of sound technology and literature across Argentina, Cuba, and the United States. His first book, Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas, investigates the co-evolution of radio and the novel in Argentina, Cuba, and the United States, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Modernist Studies Association's First Book Prize. He is now completing a second monograph on textual and musical experiments with tape technology in the late 1960s and their consequences for testimonial writing, rock nacional, electronic music, and audiobooks in the Americas. Alongside this, his co-edited volume We're Having Much More Fun: Punk Archives for the Present from CBGB to Gilman and Beyond, with Judith Peraino, celebrates the ways punks have built and documented their own misfit collectives since the mid-1970s, drawing on interviews and essays from figures like Ian MacKaye, Aaron Cometbus, and Martín Sorrondeguy.

As chair, McEnaney will also continue building BCNM's community and public programming. During his time as Director, he sharpened the center's focus on Latinx media ecologies in partnership with the Center for Latin American Studies, launched programming on interdisciplinary responses to the rise of AI in collaboration with the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and helped inaugurate a series of Indigenous sound studies events with Indigenous Technologies coordinator Sierra Edd. He also founded the Latin American Journals Project, an online archive that digitizes and expands access to Latin American and Hispanophone Caribbean literary journals.