Current DE Students
Matteo Cavelier Riccardi
Home Department: Comparative Literature
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: Matteo studies the historical reception of foreign literature and film in order to excavate the different frameworks the Chinese intelligentsia used to apprehend art, focusing on Socialist China but also looking to points of convergence with Taiwan and Hong Kong. His dissertation, Italian Neo-Realism in China, explores the largely unknown history of exchange, collaboration and debate between Italian filmmakers and writers and their Chinese counterparts throughout the postwar era.
Shirelle Maya
Home Department: Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (MELC)
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: Shirelle's dissertation examines modern Hebrew and Yiddish literary and visual cultures, focusing on their role in mediating changing ideals and norms surrounding gender, love, marriage, sex, and sexuality from the late 19th century through the 1930s.
Kévin Drif
Home Department: French
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: Representations of education and schools in French Banlieue cinema and television, and the way this space is used as a conflictual terrain of negotiation of national identity against students of immigrant origins.
Katherine Franco
Home Department: English
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: My research examines literary and artistic responses to imperialism, global capitalism, and the rise of the internet at the end of the twentieth century.
Sam George Jackson
Home Department: Comparative Literature
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: The American alternative television movement, with a particular focus on public access television.
Max Kaisler
Home Department: Comparative Literature
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: My dissertation “Sensing Machines” proposes we might approach the barometer, a meteorological instrument of variable type and precision that measures changes in atmospheric pressure, as a technology that has produced profound, if subtle and seemingly insignificant, shifts in post-Enlightenment notions of the human as a delicate but imperfect machine perpetually occupied in operations of sensing and making sense of its environment. This project explores the barometer’s long history as an object of and model for philosophical, literary, and social speculation by romantic, realist, and modernist philosophers, writers, artists, and the general reading public from the late 18th century onward, as the barometer shifts from its early affiliations with the experiments of natural philosophers, to become an emblem of the romantic artist’s acute sensitivity to his inner and outer environments–a sensitivity already verging dangerously on hypochondria, the 18th and 19th centuries’ male counterpart to hysteria. From here the barometer becomes associated principally with the bourgeois domestic sphere and the at once too-susceptible and too-impermeable female mind and eventually develops into a technological model for realist and modernist writers and artists.
Sean Lambert
Home Department: German
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: Sean’s research focuses on Weimar cinema and early film. His dissertation puts film theory into conversation with aesthetic philosophy, considering how the emergence of cinema produced new aesthetic categories and transformed techniques of aesthetic judgment in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Yvonne Lin
Home Department: East Asian Languages and Culture
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: Examines the aestheticization of “pastness” in Chinese digital media culture of the late 20th and early 21st century and its implications for understanding the contemporary.
Filip Sestan
Home Department: Slavic Languages & Literature
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: Soviet and Yugoslav cinema, critical theory and Marxism, Factography, theories of montage, culture of the early Soviet period, New Yugoslav Studies.
Lou Silhol-Macher
Home Department: German Studies
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: Lou's dissertation "Of Goo and Dust: Suspending Form to Find Critique" explores the aesthetics of formlessness in German and American minoritarian video art and film, theorizing how experimentations at the edge of material form — with goo, dust, in suspension — articulate a critique of Western world-making.
Jadie Stillwell
Home Department: English
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: The intersection of film aesthetics and labor, historiography, and feminist theory.
Maggie Jie Sun
Home Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: Modern and Contemporary East Asian literature and media studies.
Amber Sweat
Home Department: French
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: My dissertation project analyzes the lives of Black girls—in the Caribbean, West Africa, and the Parisian banlieue—as they engage in processes of self-imaging. I explore a re-orientation of the ''self'' for Black girls, and how these re-orientations are (inter)mediated. I am especially interested in the Black girl as a conceptual figure that can tell us about binarized oppositions between woman/child; technological histories; and the encoding of racialized beauty standards into technology.
Gianna Ward-Vetrano
Home Department: Comparative Literature
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: Ideologies and ontologies of the body in modernity through a study of early twentieth century avant-garde dance and Italian futurism.
Pamela Weidman
Home Department: English
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: My dissertation looks at popular animated films and major novels from the '30s through '50s that adopt techniques of limited characterization as a way of repurposing the pervasive visual culture of World War II propaganda. I examine ideas of character, type, and stereotype in films from Disney, UPA, and avant-garde filmmakers, and in novels from Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. In my capacity as an English PhD candidate pursuing a designated emphasis in Film & Media, I also teach and work on early computer games, early cinema, Woolf, Proust, and broader theories of experimental character and animation.
Qingyang Freya Zhou
Home Department: German
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: My dissertation, tentatively titled “Precarious Kinship and Conflicting Memories in Korean-German Film and Literature,” will examine both historical and contemporary cultural productions that reflect on North/South Korea and East/West Germany’s shared legacies of national division and (re-)unification.
Jiahe Mei
Home Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: Jiahe Mei is interested in the entanglements between disability and media technology in modern China.
Vincent Pacheco
Home Department: South and Southeast Asian Studies
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: My research interests center on Philippine and Indonesian cinema, post-Marxist theory, and more recently, comparative economic history. My dissertation project examines the role of the aesthetic in shaping contemporary populism through an engagement with selected Indonesian and Philippine films.
Mia Yun
Home Department: Ethnomusicology/Music
Dissertation and/or Research Interests: My research interests revolve around the soundscape of horror cinema, with a specific emphasis on Korean and Japanese horror films. I am investigating how these two countries’ horror cinema invokes “fear” through the strategic use of sound and music elements. This research aims to illuminate the distinct language of soundscapes in East Asian horror films compared to conventional Hollywood horror cinema and to bridge the gap between visual theories and audio practices through theoretical and analytical approaches.