Christena Nippert-Eng, Ph.D.

Major Accomplishments:

Dr. Nippert-Eng has just completed a book on the ways individuals manage and try to achieve privacy in their daily lives.  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 2000-2002 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 the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, 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, and the Industrial Design Society of America.

Dr. Nippert-Eng teaches film-, project-, field-, and lecture-based courses at IIT.  She is Associate Chair of the department and serves as advisor to our Political Science majors. Prior to its recent merger with Domas, she also taught for two years at the Interactive Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy. Currently, she enjoys a growing 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.  In December 2006 she also joined 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. As of this past July, Dr. Nippert-Eng is Chair-Elect of the Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association. She is exceptionally proud to be a founding partner of the Chicago Graduate Student Ethnography Conference, now in its 12th year, and 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.