Ann Kirschner

Ann Kirschner is an American academic, entrepreneur, and author, best known as the author of Sala's Gift. She was the former head of Columbia University's interactive knowledge network, Fathom, and is now the University Dean of William E. Macaulay Honors College of The City University of New York.

Early career

Kirschner has had an eclectic career as an academic and writer, and as a media and marketing pioneer in broadcast television, cable, satellite, and interactive media. A Whiting Fellow in the Humanities, she received her PhD in English literature from Princeton University, following her MA from the University of Virginia and BA from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She began her career as a lecturer in Victorian literature at Princeton, and has also been a freelance writer and editor at CBS, the New York Times, and Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. She was the assistant director for English programs at the Modern Language Association, and worked as an assistant to Lola Szladits, the director of the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. She received grants from the Texas Committee for the Humanities for a study on PhDs in business and from the Littauer Foundation for research on slave labor camps.

Entrepreneurship

Her start-ups include Request Teletext, the first full-channel cable teletext service; PrimeTime 24, one of the first home satellite broadcast networks; NFL Sunday Ticket and NFL.com, the first sports league on satellite television and the Internet; and FATHOM, the first interactive knowledge network associated with leading universities, libraries, museums, and research institutions. She previously headed up new media for the National Football League (NFL), overseeing the introduction of new programming ventures in emerging technologies such as interactive television and the Internet., and is the founder of NFL.com, superbowl.com and Team NFL on America Online.

She served as president of Comma Communications, a telecommunications and interactive consulting firm. She also co-founded Satellite Broadcast Networks and PrimeTime 24, where she became the first executive vice president of sales and marketing of both companies. Earlier, she was the director of new business development for TelePrompTer/Group W Cable, where she won an ACE award in marketing.^{[citation needed]}

Kirschner has served as a scholar-in-residence at Rollins College and James Madison University. She is a current or former board member of Apollo Group, Public Agenda, Jewish Women's Archive, MOUSE, Open University of Israel, New York Media Association, Theatreworks USA, the Topps Company, the Princeton University English Department Advisory Council, and Leadership Council of the Princeton University Graduate School.

Service And Awards

She was named one of New York Magazine's "Millennium New Yorkers" and honored as a distinguished graduate of Princeton University^{[citation needed]} and SUNY Buffalo.^{[citation needed]}

Publications

Books

Kirschner is the author of Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story, the story of her mother's wartime rescue of hundreds of letters written to her during five years in Nazi slave Labor camps. The letters include the correspondence between her mother and Ala Gertner during the Holocaust. The book has also been also published in German as Salas Geheiminis, Polish, as Listy z Pudełka, Italian, as Il Dono di Sala, French, as Le Secret de ma mère,, and Chinese.

Other publications

• The Chronicle of Higher Education: Adventures in the Land of Wikipedia
• The Chronicle of Higher Education: Reading Dickens Four Ways
• The Chronicle of Higher Education: My iPad Day

External links

• Sala's Gift website
• Ann Kirschner's website
• Ann Kirschner on girlgeeks.org
• Ann Kirschner on The Technology Source

• Works by or about Ann Kirschner in libraries (WorldCat catalog)