Christena Nippert-Eng , Ph.D.

Major Accomplishments:

Dr. Nippert-Eng's new book, Islands of Privacy: Selective Concealment and Disclosure in Everyday Life will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010. This book is based on research generously funded by a grant from the Intel Research Council. Dr. Nippert-Eng will begin a second (shorter) book on privacy and socialization this fall. She also will travel to Lisbon, Portugal to visit her friends at the Instituto de Artes Visuais, Design e Marketing for their 40^th anniversary celebration.

Professor Nippert-Eng's work has been featured extensively in the media, including radio, television and newspaper interviews ranging from NPR's “Talk of the Nation” to prgrams on PBS and MSNBC and stories for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek,  Working Mother and Fast Company. She has been an invited speaker for such diverse venues as the Smithsonian Museum, the American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons' Pediatric Group, Reason Magazine's Dynamic Visions conference, MotherRead/FatherRead literacy organization, and the Industrial Design Society of America.

Dr. Nippert-Eng teaches film-, project-, field-, and lecture-based courses at IIT. Currently, she is a visiting faculty member at Simona Maschi’s Copenhagen Institute for Interaction Design in Denmark and enjoys an on-going relationship with the Instituto des Artes Visuais (IADE) in Lisbon, Portugal, where she serves on the Counseling Committee for the doctoral program and on the editorial board for The (Radical) Designist, Journal of Design Culture. She is also on the editorial board of the International Journal of Design, edited by Lin-Lin Chen at the Graduate Institute of Design, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology.

Professor Nippert-Eng has held elected council positions for the American Sociological Association's sections on the Sociology of Culture and Work, Organization and Occupations. She was a member of the advisory board for Dr. Nina Wakeford's research center, INCITE, at the University of Surrey in London. From 2010-2011, Dr. Nippert-Eng will serve as the national Chair of the Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association.  She also has held elected positions on the ASA Section Councils for the "Sociology of Culture" and "Work, Organization and Occupations." She is exceptionally proud to be a founding partner of the Chicago Graduate Student Enthnography Conference, now it its 13th year. She also spent a week in June 2009 working with the first cohort of masters students at the Copenhagen Institute for Interaction Design.

In addition to collaborations with other scholars and non-profit organizations Dr. Nippert-Eng conducts industrial research on people's behavior and relationships with objects and spaces, including information and communication technologies. She also consults with in-house research groups on the use of ethnographic methods for industrial applications. Past clients include Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Gillette, Hilton Hotels, and Steelcase.