He was previously on the faculty of Centre College, and has taught at Washington University and the University of Missouri. Barkin earned a B.A. from the University of California, and a master’s and Ph.D. from Washington University. His research concerns commercial television production in Indonesia, and how religious, government, and economic exigencies shape the development of national identity models in popular media. He has been conducting ethnographic research among producers in Jakarta since the late 1990’s, and has published a number of articles on the subject; he is currently working on a book manuscript titled Producing Indonesia: Derivation and Domestication of Global Media.