Department of Film & Media UC Berkeley

Bio

Lisa Wells Jacobson received her PhD in Film & Media in August 2022. Her work focuses on contemporary television, specifically how 21st century US serial period dramas historicize the present through restaging the past. In her dissertation, “Spy Craft: Seriality, The Americans, and Digital Ambivalence,” she argues that FX’s The Americans refigures the late Cold War as a means for allegorically exploring the contradictions of today’s mixed analog-digital culture. Spy craft, networks, and marriage are lenses through which The Americans dramatizes the perceived increases in mediality, distance, scale, and anonymity that accompany the rise of digital technology. Before joining the PhD program in Film, Lisa received an MA in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley as well as an MA (Research) in Art & Literature from Leiden University in the Netherlands and a BA from Brown University. Her broader interests include film and media theory, pedagogy, and teaching analytical writing. Her article, “Walkman Time Machine,” is forthcoming in New Review of Film and Television Studies.