GAMBIT co-principal investigator Professor Henry Jenkins has announced that he will be leaving MIT at the end of this academic year to accept a highly prestigious provost professorship at the University of Southern California. From the official announcement on his personal blog:

On Monday, I announced to the members of the Comparative Media Studies Community -- our graduate and undergraduate students, staff, researchers, faculty, and alums -- that I will be leaving MIT at the end of the current academic year to accept a new position at the University of Southern California. I have decided that the phrase "bitter-sweet" is inadequate for such a moment, prefering to adopt the phrase, "Brutal-Sublime" to capture the extreme highs and lows I feel at what is for me a significant transitional moment in my life. This turned out to be one of the most agonizing decisions I've ever had to make.

For the curious, a provost professorship at USC is a high-level faculty (not administrative) position that operates without fixed disciplines. The position was created to forge bridges between different programs at USC, a job for which Jenkins is uniquely suited. As he notes himself, USC "offered me a truly interdisciplinary position, one which straddles the Communications and Cinema Schools and which is designed to encourage collaboration and conversation between their diverse faculty."

GAMBIT wishes Jenkins the very best in his new adventure. While GAMBIT will continue, all of us in our lab (especially those who were Jenkins' graduate students at CMS) will keenly feel his absence.

More about Jenkins' departure can be found at The Chronicle of Higher Education and Gamasutra.