Media Epidemics is an interdisciplinary project in literary, cultural, film, and media studies (including digital media studies) that explores the structure of "viral media.".

In the 1980s and early 1990s, as western societies moved into a post-communist, post-atomic social condition, several factors developed in parallel in relation to viruses. 1983 marked both the discovery of the HIV virus and the first time that the term "virus" was used to describe a self-replicating computer program. At the same time that social awareness of HIV was spreading, the personal computer became more user friendly and was installed in an increasing number of middle-class homes. Thus, developing along separate trajectories, social awareness of biological viruses and social awareness of computer viruses were on the rise.

It was not until the mid-1990s however, with the advent of what is now commonly referred to as "network society", that the stage was finally set for the proliferation of what my dissertation terms "viral structures." Viral structures are located within media ecologies that may include both representational media (texts such as literature, film, etc. that "represent" the viral within their content) and operational media (media and technology, such as software and websites, that circulate in our media ecology). Thus, a viral structure can be any text/technology/etc. that represents or relies upon a paradigm of infectiousness, i.e. operation outside of control structures, obscured transmission, and an engagement in production and reproduction via unconventional means. Viral structures are one of the ways in which networked subjects negotiate power and subjectivity within the flickering presence of emerging knowledge spaces.

Media Epidemics studies viral media structures by focusing closely and also in context on such representational and operational works as William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition, the 2010 "iamamiwhoami" YouTube video series, Koji Suzuki's novel Ring, the global release patterns of the original texts and adaptations of the Ring multimedia franchise, and a variety of video-based viral structures. The dissertation also includes unique visual and digital/interactive supplements for each chapter that extend the argument.