Ph.D. 2023
Harry Burson
Dissertation: “The World in Stereo: A Genealogy of Immersive Media”
Elisa Giardina-Papa
Dissertation: “The Incomputable Image: Untraining AI”
Alina Predescu
Dissertation: “People Have the Word: Experiments with Voice in Polish Documentary, 1960-1984”
Ph.D. 2022
Kaitlin Clifton Forcier
Dissertation: “The Infinite Image: Digital Media’s Boundless Aesthetic”
Katherine Guerra
Dissertation: “Framing the Void: Trauma, Historical Erasure and the Excesses of Horror”
Lisa Jacobson
Dissertation: “Spy Craft: Seriality, The Americans, and Digital Ambivalence”
Tory Jeffay
Dissertation: “Rogue Images: The Birth of Visual Evidence”
Lida Zeitlin-Wu
Dissertation: “Seeing by Numbers: Color Systems and the Digitization of Perception”
Ph.D. 2021
Jennifer Alpert
Dissertation: “Melodrama Undercover: Resistance as a Collective Project in Contemporary Argentinean Cinema”
Jianqing Chen
Dissertation: “Touchscreen Media: The Touch and User-Spectators in Twenty-First Century China”
Jessica Ruffin
Dissertation: “A World Divided: Schopenhauer, Aesthetics, and Cinematic Experience”
Diana Ruíz
Dissertation: “Resources of Perception: Visuality and Power at the U.S.-Mexico Border”
Althea Wasow
Dissertation: “Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives”
Ph.D. 2020
Hannah Airriess
Dissertation: “Staging the Bright Life: White-Collar Cinema in Japan’s Era of High Economic Growth (1954-1971)”
Eliot Bessette
Dissertation: “Thinking Through Fear in Film and Haunts”
Norman Gendelman
Dissertation: “Coming Home: The Western, Media, and Masculinity”
Renée Pastel
Dissertation: “War in Pieces: Narrative Figures Across Media in the “War on Terror””
Ph.D. 2020
Eliot Bessette
Dissertation: “Thinking Through Fear in Film and Haunts”
Ph.D. 2019
Alexandra Bush
Dissertation: “Cold Storage: A Media History of the Glacier”
Jennifer Blaylock
Research Associate in Cinema Studies, Bowdoin College
Dissertation: “Media/Fetish: A Postcolonial Archaeology of New Media and Africa”
Dolores McElroy
Lecturer, UC Berkeley Department of Film & Media
Dissertation: “Passionate Failures: The Diva Onscreen”
Ph.D. 2018
Justin Vaccaro
Dissertation: “Human Sciences, Human Monsters: the SF-Horror Film from the 1930s to 1960s”
Ph.D. 2017
Fareed Ben-Youssef
Global Perspectives on Society Teaching Fellow, NYU-Shanghai
Dissertation: “Visions of Power: Violence, the Law and the Post-9/11 Genre Film”
Patrick Ellis
Brittain Fellow, Georgia Tech University
Dissertation: “Aeroscopics: Spectacles of the Bird’s-Eye View”
Jennifer Pranolo
Center for Humanistic Inquiry Fellow, Amherst College
Dissertation: “Studio/World: Photography’s Other Nature”
Ph.D. 2016
Robert Alford
Assistant Director, Donor Relations at UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture
Dissertation:“’To Know the Words to the Music’: Spatial Circulation, Queer Discourse and the Musical”
Christopher Goetz
Assistant Professor of Cinematic Arts, University of Iowa
Dissertation: “At Home Everywhere: Empowerment Fantasies in the Domestication of Videogames”
Kristen Loutensock
Dissertation: “Genre Disorder: Autism and Narrative in American Popular Culture”
Ph.D. 2015
Nicholas Baer
Assistant Professor of Film Studies, University of Groeningen
Dissertation: “Absolute Relativity: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism”
Irene Chien
Assistant Professor of Media and Communication at Muhlenberg College
Dissertation: “Programmed Moves: Race and Embodiment in Fighting and Dancing Videogames”
Ph.D. 2014
Jonathan Haynes
Dissertation : “The Mid-Atlantic : Fantasmatic Genealogies of the French and American New Waves”
George Larkin
Chair of Filmmaking, Associate Professor, Woodbury University, Burbank, CA
Dissertation: “Post-Production: The Invisible Revolution of Filmmaking”
Irina Leimbacher
Assistant Professor of Film Studies, Keene State College
Dissertation: “More Than Talking Heads: Nonfiction Testimony and Cinematic Form”
Erica Levin
Assistant Professor of History of Art, Ohio State University
Dissertation: “Social Media: The News in Experimental Film, Video Art, and Performance after 1960”
Kevin Wynter
Assistant Professor of Media Studies, Pomona College
Dissertation : “Feeling Absence: Horror in Cinema from Post War to Post-Wall”
Ph.D. 2013
Kris Fallon
Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media, University of California, Davis
Dissertation: “Where Truth Lies: Political Documentary Film & Digital Media, 2000-2010”
Jisung Kim
Dissertation: “The Initimacy of Distance: South Korean Cinema and the Conditions of Capitalist Individuation”
Rielle Navitski
Assistant Professor of Theatre and Film Studies, University of Georgia
Dissertation: “Sensationalism, Cinema and the Popular Press in Mexico and Brazil, 1905-1930”
Damon Young
Assistant Professor of Film and Media and French, University of California, Berkeley
Dissertation: “Making Sex Public: Cinema and the Liberal Social Body”
Ph.D. 2011
Laura Horak
Associate Professor of Film Studies, Carleton University
Dissertation: “Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women and the Legitimation of American Silent Cinema”
Jennifer Malkowski
Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, Smith College
Dissertation: “‘Dying in Full Detail’: Mortality and Duration in Digital Documentary”
Ph.D. 2010
Scott Ferguson
Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies, University of South Florida
Research Scholar, Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity
Dissertation: “Recapitulation in close-up: Ontogeny, phylogeny, and the face of evolutionary time”
Meredith Hoy
Assistant Professor of Art History and Theory, Arizona State University
Dissertation: “From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics”
Amy Rust
Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies, University of South Florida
Dissertation: “‘Passionate Detachment’: Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema, 1967 – 1974”
Ph.D. 2009
Amy Corbin
Associate Professor, Media and Communications, Muhlenberg College
Dissertation: “Traveling spectators: Cinema, geography, and multiculturalism in late twentieth-century America”
Douglas Cunningham
Adjunct Professor, Professor of Humanities, BYU
Adjunct Professor of Film and Media, University of Utah
Dissertation: “Imagining Air Force identity: Masculinity, aeriality, and the films of the U.S. Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit”
Tung-hui Hu
Associate Professor of English, University of Michigan
Postdoctoral Scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows, and Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Michigan, 2009-2012
Dissertation: “Seeing Emptiness: Berlin, Nevada, and the Space of New Media”
Anupama Kapse
Associate Professor of Film Studies, Loyola Marymount University
Film and Media Studies, Queens College, City University of New York
Dissertation: “The moving image: melodrama and early Indian cinema 1913-1939”
Ph.D. 2008
Steve Choe
Associate Professor of Critical Studies, School of Cinema, San Francisco State University
Dissertation: “Life and death in the cinema of Weimar Germany, 1919-1924”
Hoang Tan Nguyen
Associate Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies, UC San Diego
Dissertation: “A view from the bottom: Asian American masculinity and sexual representation”
Ph.D. 2006
Scott Combs
Associate Professor of English, St. John’s University in Queens, New York City
Dissertation: “Final touches: Registering death in American cinema”
Minette Hillyer
Lecturer, Department of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Dissertation : “Making home: Film and the modern American everyday”
Ph.D. 2005
Ara Osterweil
Assistant Professor, Department of English, McGill University
Dissertation: “Flesh cinema: The corporeal avant-garde 1959-1979”
Ph.D. 2004
Guo-Juin Hong
Associate Professor, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; Director, Program in the Arts of the Moving Image; Academic Director, Duke in LA Program; Duke University
Dissertation: “Cinematograph of history: Post/colonial modernity in 1930s Shanghai and new Taiwanese cinema since 1982”
Maria St John
Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, UC San Francisco; Chair, Feminist Psychology Program, New College Graduate Psychiatry Program
Dissertation: “The mammy fantasy: Psychoanalysis, race, and the ideology of absolute maternity”
Frank Wilderson
Professor, African-American Studies and Drama, UC Irvine
Dissertation: “Settler, ‘savage’, slave : cinema and the structure of U.S. antagonisms”
Ph.D. 2003
Jonah Ross
Dissertation: “Acoustic graffiti: The rock soundtrack in contemporary American cinema”
Domietta Torlasco
Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature, Northwestern University
Dissertation: “Undoing the scene of the crime: Time and vision in Italian cinema”
Roy Vallis
Lecturer, Writing Program, University of California, Santa Barbara
Dissertation: “Beowulf in Hollywood: Popular Film as Folktale and Legend”
Ph.D. 2002
Catherine Zimmer
Associate Professor of English, Pace University
Dissertation : “Film on film: Self-reflexivity and moving image technology”
Designated Emphasis
Juan Ospina Leon (Spanish and Portuguese, 2015)
Asst. Professor of Hispanic Studies, Dept. of Modern Languages and Literatures, The Catholic University of America
Todd Barnes (Rhetoric, 2010)
Associate Professor of Literature, Ramapo College of New Jersey
Mona El-Sherif (Political Science, 2010)
Assistant Professor of Arabic, Colorado College
David Pettersen (French, 2008)
Associate Professor of Film Studies, and French Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh
Elisabeth Anker (Political Science, 2007)
Associate Professor, American Studies, George Washington University
Zeynep Gürsel (Anthropology, 2007)
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Macalester College
June Hwang (German, 2007)
Associate Professor of German, University of Rochester
Rani Neutill (Ethnic Studies, 2007)
Harvard University, Committee on Degrees in History and Literature
Polina Barskova (Slavic, 2006)
Associate Professor of Russian Literature; Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies Faculty, Hampshire College
Jane McGonigal (Performance Studies, 2006)
Games designer and researcher, lecturer, consultant
Christopher Oscarson (Scandinavian, 2006)
Associate Professor, Department of Humanities, Classics and Comparative Literature, Brigham Young University
Minh-ha T. Pham (Ethnic Studies, 2006)
Associate Professor/Faculty Fellow of Social and Cultural Analysis, Pratt institute
Andrey Shcherbenok (Rhetoric, 2006)
Three-year post-doc, Columbia University, Society of Fellows; since 2010, Fellow, Russian and Slavonic Studies, The University of Sheffield
Reid Davis (Performance Studies, 2005)
Adjunct Professor, Department of Performing Arts, Saint Mary’s College, Moraga; also works extensively as a theater director.
Deborah Shamoon (Japanese, 2005)
Associate Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Notre Dame
Andrew Uroskie (Rhetoric, 2005)
Associate Professor, Art Department, Stony Brook University (fields of specialization: Late Modern and Contemporary Art, Photography and the Moving Image)
Christopher Caes (Slavic, 2004)
Lecturer in Polish/Acting Director, East Central European Center, Columbia University
Kirsten Cather (Japanese, 2004)
Associate Professor, Asian Studies, University of Texas, Austin
José Alaniz (Comparative Literature, 2003)
Associate Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Washington
Jennifer Kapczynski (German, 2003)
Assistant Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures, Washington University, St Louis
Arne Lunde (Scandinavian, 2003)
Associate Professor, The Scandinavian Section, University of California, Los Angeles
Lucia Galleno (Spanish and Portuguese, 2002)
Associate Professor, Queens University, Charlotte, North Carolina
Jared Sexton (Ethnic Studies, 2002)
Associate Professor, African American Studies and Film and Media Studies, School of Humanities, University of California, Irvine
Cari Borja (Anthropology, 2001)
Clothes designer. See Cariborja.com
Lilya Kaganovsky (Comparative Literature, 2000)
Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign