on four days' notice. I asked why they waited until the last minute, and they said they would have invited me sooner, but because I was considered a founder of the field they assumed I was dead. I'm not." Return to academia From 1987 to 1993 Stone was Haraway's student, marking Stone's return to academia. At Haraway's suggestion Stone visited University of California, San Diego campus as an exchange student in the newly formed Science Studies program. Following a dispute between progressive and conservative faculty factions, Stone was offered a job as Instructor in the Department of Sociology, teaching courses in sociology, anthropology, political science, English, communications, and the experimental program "The Making of the Modern World.", In 1992, she took an appointment as an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Austin. Stone received her doctorate in 1993. Her dissertation, "Presence", which Haraway supervised, was published in 1996 by MIT Press as The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. Stone described the work as "creat(ing) a discourse which contains all the elements of the original discourse but which is quite different from it ... remember that at heart I am a narrator, a shameless teller of stories." In the years following the book's publication, several major social science departments fractured into separate departments along lines that in part came to be drawn by reference to "Desire and Technology" and other, similar publications. UT Austin ACTLab Beginning in 1993, Stone established the New Media program she named ACTLab (Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory) in the Radio-Television-Film department. This work, and research in virtual communities, social software, and novel methods of presenting academic topics, drew wide attention, and contributed to the establishment and legitimation of what is now generally called New Media Art. Stone's work and presence in the RTF department has been bitterly contested by powerful conservative faculty members, who have repeatedly tried to remove or marginalize her. In 1998 this small but vocal group issued a negative departmental report recommending that Stone be denied tenure. The university overruled this report, citing Stone's contributions to multiple fields and reaffirming its commitment to original or unusual scholarship. Granting Stone tenure had the negative effect of provoking attacks on her work and credibility by powerful conservative faculty within the RTF department, which for years has responded to inquiries with the statement that there is no New Media