Biography

Michael Darroch is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Arts in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design at York University. He is currently the Program Lead for the Creative Technologies program at York’s new Markham Campus, launched in Fall 2024. He served as AMPD’s Associate Dean, Academic (2020-2023) and Interim Dean (April-June 2024). He previously served as Associate Dean, Partnership Development and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Windsor, where he taught courses in media art histories, visual culture, and urban ecologies in the School of Creative Arts. He has held a Visiting Fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory (University of London, 2015), a Humanities Research Group Fellowship (University of Windsor, 2016-17), and a McLuhan Centenary Fellowship (iSchool, University of Toronto, 2016-18). He is Co-Director of the research-creation hub IN/TERMINUS focused on comparative borderlands studies, participatory art interventions, and exhibition curation. He co-edited Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban (MQUP 2014), an interdisciplinary collection that situates different historical and methodological currents in urban media studies. His SSHRC-funded research projects on histories of arts and media education played a critical role in re-issuing the landmark interdisciplinary media studies journal Explorations (1953-59) co-edited by Marshall McLuhan, Edmund Carpenter, and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt.

His 2019 SSHRC Connection grant Edgy Media: On Borders, Migrations, Media Studies and Media Arts facilitated the 4thiteration of the international touring exhibition Feedback: Marshall McLuhan and the Arts, which he co-curated as a cross-border collaboration between the University of Windsor’s School of Creative Arts and Detroit’s College for Creative Studies, and the Edgy Media symposium featuring 30 scholars and artists addressing comparative border and media arts studies. He is Co-Investigator (with Lee Rodney, UWindsor) on the 2020 SSHRC Insight grant Sensing Borders: Mapping, Media and Migration, which seeks to extend discussions around mapping in media arts by engaging with the complex dynamics of contemporary bordering practices and migratory trends that have marked borderlands spaces in different ways over time. He is also Co-Investigator (with Zoë Druick, SFU and others) on the 2021 SSHRC Insight grant Distributed Networks: Media Archaeologies of Educational TV and Communication Studies in Canada, 1945-1975. Through detailed archival studies, this project is unearthing overlooked histories of media expansion into mid-20th century educational institutions. His recent publications engage with histories of Canadian and Toronto School communication and media studies, urban media cultures, and borderlands visual cultures.