Dr. Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University
Wesch graduated summa cum laude from the Kansas State University Anthropology Program in 1997 and returned as a faculty member in 2004 after graduate studies at the University of Virginia. There he pursued research on social and cultural change in Melanesia, living in the Mountain Ok region of Papua New Guinea for a total of 18 months from 1999-2003. Wesch has received numerous grants and fellowships for his research, including a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, Explorer’s Club Grant, and a Fulbright-Hays International Dissertation Research Fellowship.
Currently Wesch is launching the Digital Ethnography working group at Kansas State University to examine the impacts of digital technology on human interaction. The first outcome of this work was a short video called “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.”