About Me

(For CV, see here).

Meryl Alper is a Ph.D. student in Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California.  She graduated magna cum laude from Northwestern University in 2005, double majoring in Communication Studies and History.  She also holds a certificate in Early Childhood Education from UCLA.

Working with her advisor at USC Annenberg, Professor Henry Jenkins, and closely with USC Cinema School Professor Ellen Seiter, her research focuses on families’ evolving relationships with old and new media and communication technologies.  In terms of populations, she has a particular emphasis on young children and youth with disabilities.  In regards to topics, she has been doing work on transmedia, play, and learning, and on youth, families, and hacker/maker culture.

As an undergraduate at Northwestern, she was Lab Assistant Manager in the NSF-funded Children’s Digital Media Center/Digital-Kids Lab and interned in the Education & Research Department at Sesame Workshop in New York.  Post graduation, she worked in Los Angeles as a Research Manager for Nick Jr., conducting formative research for the Emmy-nominated educational preschool television series Ni Hao, Kai-lan and The Fresh Beat Band.  Currently, she serves as Research Assistant with the Annenberg Innovation Lab, and is a Research Associate with The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.

She has a forthcoming article in New Media & Society, and has also been published in the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Digital Culture & Education, and ACM interactions.  In addition, she has a book chapter on children and convergence culture in the recently published Routledge International Handbook of Children, Adolescents and Media (2013).

Her research has been featured in Wired Magazine.  She is also the recipient of the Top Student Paper Award (2011) in the Children, Adolescents and Media Division of the International Communication Association (ICA).

Meryl Alper can be reached via email at malper [at] usc [dot] edu, and on Twitter @merylalper.