Alumni

Hannah Airriess

PhD 2020

Dissertation: “Staging the Bright Life: White-Collar Cinema in Japan’s Era of High Economic Growth (1954-1971)”

Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultures, Indiana University

Hannah Airriess is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. Airriess specializes in Japanese film and media, with a specific focus on media’s articulation of shifting economic structures and ideas of nation across mid 20thcentury East Asia. She is currently working on a...

Robert Alford

PhD 2016

Dissertation: “’To Know the Words to the Music’: Spatial Circulation, Queer Discourse and the Musical”

Robert Alford’s dissertation, “’To Know the Words to the Music’: Spatial Circulation, Queer Discourse and the Musical,” historicizes the relationship between homosexuals and musicals, and theorizes how popular song enabled forms of spatial and linguistic mobility that allowed queers to pass as normative subjects. His interests beyond film theory and history include queer theory, new media theory, theories of sound and the voice, sociolinguistics,...

Jennifer Alpert

PhD 2022

Dissertation: “Melodrama Undercover: Resistance as a Collective Project in Contemporary Argentinean Cinema”

Nicholas Baer

PhD 2015

Dissertation: “Absolute Relativity: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism”

Assistant Professor, Department of German, UC Berkeley

Fareed Ben-Youssef

PhD 2017

Dissertation: “Visions of Power: Violence, the Law and the Post-9/11 Genre Film”

Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies Texas Tech University

Dr. Fareed Ben-Youssef is an Assistant Professor in Film & Media Studies at Texas Tech University. He earned his PhD in Film and Media from the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. Before arriving at Texas Tech, he served as a Global Perspectives on Society Teaching Fellow at NYU Shanghai.

His first project, No Jurisdiction: Legal, Political, and...

Eliot Bessette

PhD 2020

Dissertation Title: “Thinking Through Fear in Film and Haunts”

Eliot Bessette received his Ph.D. in 2020. His dissertation, “Thinking Through Fear in Film and Haunts,” advances a new form of philosophically productive close readings of the emotion of fear, as elicited by horror cinema and immersive theatrical haunted house attractions, or “haunts.” His research has appeared or is forthcoming in JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and ReFocus: The Films of...

Jennifer Blaylock

PhD 2019

Dissertation: “Media/Fetish: A Postcolonial Archaeology of New Media and Africa”

Assistant Professor of Radio, Television & Film at Rowan University

Jennifer Blaylock (PhD 2019) is an Assistant Professor of Radio, Television & Film at Rowan University. She is currently working on her book project, Making Media New: Race in African Media History, a postcolonial media archaeology that analyzes...

Harry Burson

PhD 2023

Dissertation: "The World in Stereo: A Genealogy of Immersive Media"

Harry Burson is a media theorist and historian whose research explores the intersection of digital and aural cultures. His book manuscript, The World in Stereo, examines how sound technologies have shaped both our social understanding and embodied experience of digital media. Through original archival research, he traces the development of immersive sonic media from early telephony to virtual reality. He shows how the concept of immersion has fostered the imagination of the...

Alex Bush

PhD 2019

Dissertation: “Cold Storage: A Media History of the Glacier”

Alex Bush received her PhD in Film & Media in 2019 and was a 2017-18 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Fellow. Her dissertation, “Cold Storage: A Media History of the Glacier,” examines the role played by visual and communications media in bringing nature into a Western mode of historical thought. She has authored articles forthcoming in Cinema Journal and in the collection Unwatchable (ed. Baer, Hennefeld, Horak & Iversen). At Berkeley, she has co-organized...

Jianqing Chen

PhD 2021

Dissertation: “Touchscreen Media: The Touch and User-Spectators in Twenty-First Century China”

Jianqing Chen was a Doreen B. Townsend Dissertation Fellow, she received her PhD in Film and Media with a Designated Emphasis on Critical Theory in 2021. She holds a MA in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University (2014). Her dissertation, “Touchscreen Media: The Touch and User-Spectators in Twenty-First Century China,” examines changes in media and sensory perception caused by the touchscreen as a new viewing technology and platform through...