Film & Media Ph.D. graduates pursue careers in higher education, research, arts and cultural organizations, media, and other professional fields. The list below includes graduates’ dissertation titles and, where available, their first position after completing the Ph.D. and their current position. Career information reflects information available to the department and may change over time.
Ph.D. 2025
Morgan Jennings
Dissertation: “Unbearable Images: Sexual Violence and Cinematic Seduction”
Current position: Postdoctoral Fellow, Engagements Program, University of Virginia
Ph.D. 2024
Julia Irwin
Dissertation: “Patterning Recognition: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Perception in the Long Twentieth Century”
First position after the Ph.D.: Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Art & Art History and Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Stanford University
Current position: Independent scholar
Ph.D. 2023
Harry Burson
Dissertation: “The World in Stereo: A Genealogy of Immersive Media”
Current position: Lecturer, Department of English, University of Illinois Chicago
Elisa Giardina-Papa
Dissertation: “The Incomputable Image: Untraining AI”
Current position: Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
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”
Current position: Assistant Professor of English, University of Illinois Chicago
Katherine Guerra
Dissertation: “Framing the Void: Trauma, Historical Erasure and the Excesses of Horror”
Current position: Assistant Professor of Critical Studies, Department of Cinematic Arts, California State University, Long Beach
Lisa Jacobson
Dissertation: “Spy Craft: Seriality, The Americans, and Digital Ambivalence”
Current position: Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Tech
Tory Jeffay
Dissertation: “Rogue Images: The Birth of Visual Evidence”
Current position: Postdoctoral Fellow, Society of Fellows, Dartmouth College
Lida Zeitlin-Wu
Dissertation: “Seeing by Numbers: Color Systems and the Digitization of Perception”
First position after the Ph.D.: Postdoctoral Fellow, Digital Studies Institute, University of Michigan
Current position: Assistant Professor, Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, University of Notre Dame
Ph.D. 2021
Jennifer Alpert
Dissertation: “Melodrama Undercover: Resistance as a Collective Project in Contemporary Argentinean Cinema”
Current position: Provostial Fellow and Social Science Research Scholar, Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University
Jianqing Chen
Dissertation: “Touchscreen Media: The Touch and User-Spectators in Twenty-First Century China”
First position after the Ph.D.: Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and of Film and Media Studies, Washington University in St. Louis
Current position: Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and of Film and Media Studies, Washington University in St. Louis
Jessica Ruffin
Dissertation: “A World Divided: Schopenhauer, Aesthetics, and Cinematic Experience”
First position after the Ph.D.: Fellow, Michigan Society of Fellows, and Assistant Professor of Film, Television, and Media, University of Michigan
Current position: Assistant Professor of Literature, MIT
Diana Ruíz
Dissertation: “Resources of Perception: Visuality and Power at the U.S.-Mexico Border”
First position after the Ph.D.: Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Washington
Current position: Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Washington
Althea Wasow
Dissertation: “Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives”
First position after the Ph.D.: UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz
Current position: Assistant Professor, Department of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Ph.D. 2020
Hannah Airriess
Dissertation: “Staging the Bright Life: White-Collar Cinema in Japan’s Era of High Economic Growth (1954–1971)”
Current position: Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Indiana University Bloomington
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’”
First position after the Ph.D.: Assistant Professor of Screen Studies, Communication Department, Boston College
Current position: Assistant Professor of Screen Studies, Communication Department, Boston College
Ph.D. 2019
Alexandra Bush
Dissertation: “Cold Storage: A Media History of the Glacier”
Jennifer Blaylock
Dissertation: “Media/Fetish: A Postcolonial Archaeology of New Media and Africa”
First position after the Ph.D.: Research Associate in Cinema Studies, Bowdoin College
Current position: Assistant Professor of Radio, Television & Film, Rowan University
Dolores McElroy
Dissertation: “Passionate Failures: The Diva Onscreen”
Current position: Lecturer, UC Berkeley Department of Film & Media
Ph.D. 2018
Justin Vaccaro
Dissertation: “Human Sciences, Human Monsters: The SF-Horror Film from the 1930s to 1960s”
Current position: Instructor, Arts and Cultural Studies, Berkeley City College
Ph.D. 2017
Fareed Ben-Youssef
Dissertation: “Visions of Power: Violence, the Law and the Post-9/11 Genre Film”
First position after the Ph.D.: Global Perspectives on Society Teaching Fellow, NYU Shanghai
Current position: Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies, Texas Tech University
Patrick Ellis
Dissertation: “Aeroscopics: Spectacles of the Bird’s-Eye View”
First position after the Ph.D.: Brittain Fellow, Georgia Tech
Current position: Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Tampa
Jennifer Pranolo
Dissertation: “Studio/World: Photography’s Other Nature”
First position after the Ph.D.: Center for Humanistic Inquiry Fellow, Amherst College
Ph.D. 2016
Robert Alford
Dissertation: “‘To Know the Words to the Music’: Spatial Circulation, Queer Discourse and the Musical”
First position after the Ph.D.: Assistant Director, Donor Relations, UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture
Current position: Partner & Vice President, Weiswood Strategies Ltd.
Christopher Goetz
Dissertation: “At Home Everywhere: Empowerment Fantasies in the Domestication of Videogames”
First position after the Ph.D.: Assistant Professor of Film Studies and New Media, University of Iowa
Current position: Associate Professor, Department of Cinematic Arts, University of Iowa
Kristen Loutensock
Dissertation: “Genre Disorder: Autism and Narrative in American Popular Culture”
Current position: Honors College Lecturer, University at Albany
Ph.D. 2015
Nicholas Baer
Dissertation: “Absolute Relativity: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism”
First position after the Ph.D.: Harper-Schmidt Fellow, Society of Fellows, University of Chicago
Current position: Associate Professor of Film & Media and German, UC Berkeley
Irene Chien
Dissertation: “Programmed Moves: Race and Embodiment in Fighting and Dancing Videogames”
First position after the Ph.D.: Assistant Professor of Media & Communication, Muhlenberg College
Ph.D. 2014
Andrew Moisey
Dissertation: “The Photographic World Picture”
Current position: Associate Professor, Department of History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University
Jonathan Haynes
Dissertation: “The Mid-Atlantic: Fantasmatic Genealogies of the French and American New Waves”
George Larkin
Dissertation: “Post-Production: The Invisible Revolution of Filmmaking”
Current position: Professor of Filmmaking, Woodbury University
Irina Leimbacher
Dissertation: “More Than Talking Heads: Nonfiction Testimony and Cinematic Form”
Current position: Faculty, Film and Video, California Institute of the Arts
Erica Levin
Dissertation: “Social Media: The News in Experimental Film, Video Art, and Performance after 1960”
Current position: Associate Professor of History of Art, Ohio State University
Kevin Wynter
Dissertation: “Feeling Absence: Horror in Cinema from Post War to Post-Wall”
Current position: Associate Professor of Media Studies, Pomona College
Ph.D. 2013
Kris Fallon
Dissertation: “Where Truth Lies: Political Documentary Film & Digital Media, 2000–2010”
Current position: Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital Media, UC Davis
Jisung Kim
Dissertation: “The Intimacy of Distance: South Korean Cinema and the Conditions of Capitalist Individuation”
Rielle Navitski
Dissertation: “Sensationalism, Cinema and the Popular Press in Mexico and Brazil, 1905–1930”
First position after the Ph.D.: Assistant Professor of Theatre and Film Studies, University of Georgia
Current position: Professor, Department of Theatre and Film Studies, University of Georgia
Damon Young
Dissertation: “Making Sex Public: Cinema and the Liberal Social Body”
First position after the Ph.D.: Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Scholar, Society of Fellows, University of Michigan
Current position: Associate Professor of French and Film & Media, UC Berkeley
Ph.D. 2011
Laura Horak
Dissertation: “Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women and the Legitimation of American Silent Cinema”
First position after the Ph.D.: Postdoctoral Researcher in Film Studies, Stockholm University
Current position: Professor of Film Studies, Carleton University
Jennifer Malkowski
Dissertation: “‘Dying in Full Detail’: Mortality and Duration in Digital Documentary”
Current position: Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies, Smith College
Ph.D. 2010
Scott Ferguson
Dissertation: “Recapitulation in Close-Up: Ontogeny, Phylogeny, and the Face of Evolutionary Time”
Current position: Associate Professor, University of South Florida
Meredith Hoy
Dissertation: “From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics”
Current position: Associate Professor, School of Art, Arizona State University
Amy Rust
Dissertation: “‘Passionate Detachment’: Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema, 1967–1974”
Current position: Associate Professor, University of South Florida
Ph.D. 2009
Amy Corbin
Dissertation: “Traveling Spectators: Cinema, Geography, and Multiculturalism in Late Twentieth-Century America”
Current position: Professor of Media & Communications and Film Studies, Muhlenberg College
Douglas Cunningham
Dissertation: “Imagining Air Force Identity: Masculinity, Aeriality, and the Films of the U.S. Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit”
Current position: Instructor, University of Utah Continuing Education
Tung-Hui Hu
Dissertation: “Seeing Emptiness: Berlin, Nevada, and the Space of New Media”
First position after the Ph.D.: Postdoctoral Scholar, Michigan Society of Fellows, University of Michigan
Current position: Associate Professor, Comparative Media Studies/Writing, MIT
Anupama Kapse
Dissertation: “The Moving Image: Melodrama and Early Indian Cinema, 1913–1939”
Current position: Associate Professor of Film, Television, and Media Studies, Loyola Marymount University
Ph.D. 2008
Steve Choe
Dissertation: “Life and Death in the Cinema of Weimar Germany, 1919–1924”
Current position: Associate Professor of Critical Studies, School of Cinema, San Francisco State University
Hoang Tan Nguyen
Dissertation: “A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation”
Current position: Associate Professor of Literature, UC San Diego
Ph.D. 2006
Scott Combs
Dissertation: “Final Touches: Registering Death in American Cinema”
First positions after the Ph.D.: Teaching appointments at UC Berkeley and Stanford University
Current position: Associate Professor of English, St. John’s University
Minette Hillyer
Dissertation: “Making Home: Film and the Modern American Everyday”
Ph.D. 2005
Ara Osterweil
Dissertation: “Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Avant-Garde, 1959–1979”
Current position: Associate Professor, Department of English, McGill University
Ph.D. 2004
Guo-Juin Hong
Dissertation: “Cinematograph of History: Post/Colonial Modernity in 1930s Shanghai and New Taiwanese Cinema since 1982”
First position after the Ph.D.: Assistant Professor of Asian and African Languages and Literature, Duke University
Current position: Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Associate Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Duke University
Maria St John
Dissertation: “The Mammy Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Race, and the Ideology of Absolute Maternity”
Frank Wilderson
Dissertation: “Settler, ‘Savage,’ Slave: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms”
Current position: Chancellor’s Professor of African American Studies, UC Irvine
Ph.D. 2003
Jonah Ross
Dissertation: “Acoustic Graffiti: The Rock Soundtrack in Contemporary American Cinema”
Domietta Torlasco
Dissertation: “Undoing the Scene of the Crime: Time and Vision in Italian Cinema”
First position after the Ph.D.: Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities, University of Chicago
Current position: Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature, Northwestern University
Roy Vallis
Dissertation: “Beowulf in Hollywood: Popular Film as Folktale and Legend”
Current position: Lecturer, retired, Writing Program, UC Santa Barbara
Ph.D. 2002
Catherine Zimmer
Dissertation: “Film on Film: Self-Reflexivity and Moving Image Technology”
Current position: Professor of Film and Screen Studies, Pace University