Judith Pintar joined the iSchool in August 2018 as a senior lecturer. She previously served as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and as a visiting assistant professor in Sociology, where she earned her PhD. According to Pintar, her doctoral work at Illinois was shaped by an "eclectic intellectual community of sociologists, historians, and information scientists" pursuing interdisciplinary studies of science, technology, information, and medicine.
Pintar will teach courses in the areas of social and global informatics and particularly in the area of archiving cultural heritage. Her experience includes recent work with Illinois Informatics initiatives to develop a game studies curriculum and to shape the Global Informatics program, which will pair the informatics minor with majors in the Russian, East-European & Eurasian Center, and the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics.
Her research interests include digital storytelling, game studies, digital literacy, and the development of interactive and AI interfaces. She serves as director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) research cluster, Playful by Design: Interdisciplinary Game Studies @ Illinois.
"I'm looking forward to helping to include the iSchool in new and exciting interdisciplinary ventures," she said. "I am currently co-teaching a course with Rachel Switzky, the director of the Siebel Center for Design— one of many potentially fruitful collaborations between the iSchool and the Design Center that may emerge before the center is even built."
Pintar looks forward to working more closely with her iSchool colleagues as a senior lecturer. "As a sociologist of information, science, and technology, there is nowhere on this campus that I could possibly feel more at home than the iSchool."