Ritesh Mehta is a PhD Candidate in Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in the University of Southern California. Although the mainstay of his research is ethnographically studying the production worlds of film and television, he has a long standing interest in topics related to popular culture on the one hand and philosophy and literature on the other. He has worked closely with both of Henry Jenkins's research groups, Civic Paths, as well as Project New Media Literacies (the latter with Erin Reilly).

For Ritesh, The Lord of the Rings--both the books, extending back to The Silmarillion, and the movies, extending into the bonus featurettes and filmmakers' commentary--is a reason to live and to go to work, and he has a mysterious and deep empathy for Smeagol-Gollum. Ritesh majored in marketing and management at the University of Pennsylvania, and completed his MA in philosophy from the University of Missouri-St Louis. (Ha! Talk about multiple juxtapositions!)

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