PhD Candidate Profiles
Naomi Angel
Naomi has worked in South Africa, Japan, Australia and Canada as a researcher, producer, journalist and teacher. She holds a BA in Psychology from the University of British Columbia and completed her MA in Media Studies at Concordia University. Her thesis focused on race and representation in the media, highlighting mixed-race representation in film. Her current research focuses on cultural memory and the processes of memorialization.
Inês Barreiros
Inês holds a BA in History and Art History from the University of Lisbon and an MA in Contemporary Art History from the New University of Lisbon, funded by Portugal's Foundation for Science and Technology. She first exiled herself from her previous disciplines and pursued a more interdisciplinary approach in her MA thesis, "Under the Gaze of Shameless Gods": Visual Culture and Contemporary Landscapes, soon to be published in Portugal by IHA/Colibri Editors, which incorporated Postcolonial theory, Anthropology, and Cultural and Critical Studies. She has also studied at the Sorbonne-Paris IV (1999-2000) and at The New School for Social Research (2008-2009). While studying in the U.S., she continues to be an associated researcher for IHA/Estudos de Arte Contemporânea (New University of Lisbon). At the moment she is interested in notions of exile and (active) ruin as subjective spaces in the contemporary imaginary (especially film).
Solon Barocas
Solon is a doctoral student in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He was previously a Program Associate at the Russell Sage Foundation, where he helped administer major research initiatives on intercultural contact, social inequality, and the social and political consequences of the war on terror. Earlier, he served as Deputy Editor of Millennium: Journal of International Studies, housed at the London School of Economics, where he also obtained his MSc in International Relations. His master's thesis, "De/re/coding Security in 'Societies of Control:' Data-mining as Political Practice," was recently published in a special issue of the St Antony's International Review on "The Internet: Power and Governance in a Digitised World," which he also presented at a related conference co-hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute. Barocas graduated from Brown University with a BA in Art-Semiotics and International Relations. At the University's Watson Institute for International Studies, he worked for over two years on the Information, Technology, War, and Peace Project.
Frederico Bertagnoli
Adjunct Instructor, NYU; MA, Interactive Telecommunications, NYU. As a graphic designer, his projects include animation and digital editing for the award-winning shows The Genomic Revolution and Pearls at the American Museum of Natural History. His teaching and research interests include the social history of communication technologies, sociology of culture, and information and communication design.
Jamie Berthe
Having completed her undergraduate work at the American University of Paris (in Philosophy and Film Studies), Jamie went on to pursue an MA in Cinema Studies at Tisch/NYU. Some of her many research interests include the cinema of Jean Rouch, ethnographic and documentary film, the Nigerian video film industry (Nollywood), visual epistemology, and theories of the archive.
Kate Brideau
Kate is from one of those areas of New York State that isn't located in the five boroughs. She studies visual culture, philosophy of language, semiotics, and aesthetics. Interested in the meeting places of the verbal and the visible, she has done work on posters, graffiti, typography, and appreciates any opportunity to interpret "scholarly research" as "sitting around reading comics." Her work seems to be moving in the direction of questions concerning reference, representation, perception, or intentionality. Kate has a BA in English from Ohio Wesleyan University (20th century Irish literature), and an AM in Humanities from the University of Chicago (Northern Irish political posters). She's a painter and plays the piano.
Song Chong
Song's primary research interest is in the practices and production photojournalism. She is currently focusing that research towards photographic archives and the way in which they serve as a supplement to experience. She is also interested in the way in which photographic archives create notions of national identity, citizenship, and conversely, exclusion.
Cynthia Conti
MS, Comparative Media Studies, MIT; BA, Communications and Culture, Screen Studies, Clark University. Cynthia’s research focuses on the microradio movement, radio history and broadcast regulations. Before entering the Ph.D. program, she taught courses in video production, communications and media studies at several schools and colleges in the Boston area.
Gabriele Cosentino
Gabriele received a Laurea Degree (BS/MA) in Communication Science from the University of Bologna, Italy, where he studied with Umberto Eco. During his undergraduate studies, he was an exchange student at the University of California, San Diego. Before entering the Ph.D program at NYU, Gabriele worked as a project developer and event organizer in the field of digital media for public and private institutions. In 2005 he organized the international symposium on activism, entertainment and politics "The War of the Worlds", which received the joint support of the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and the Department of Arts and Arts Professions at NYU. He has published the essay "Hacking the iPod" in "Cyerbsounds" (Peter Lang, New York: 2006), and presented his work at international conferences. In 2006 and 2007, Gabriele was an adjunct professor at the NYU Florence campus, where he conducted research for his dissertation on the transformations of political communications in Italy. His research interests include politics and popular culture, globalization and digital media
Marco Deseriis
Marco was born and raised in Rome, where he earned a BA/MA in Literature and Philosophy from the University La Sapienza in 1996. Since then he as been a contributor to various national Italian dailies and magazines including L'Unità, D La Repubblica delle Donne, Repubblica.it, and Rai.it. In 2003, along with co-author Giuseppe Marano, he wrote the book Net.Art: L'arte della Connessione (Milano: Shake). Marco has also been involved with the organization of the net culture festival Digital-Is-Not-Analog (d-i-n-a.net) and of the culture jamming festival The Influencers (theinfluencers.org). In 2007 he received a grant from the Council for Media & Culture to program the NYU conference Radars & Fences. Research interests include history of the avant-gardes; culture jamming as mythmaking; tactical media, net art, and other social uses of new media.
Hatim El-Hibri email
BA, Psychology, Rutgers University; MA, Culture & Communication, NYU Hatim is interested in visual cultures of post-colonial situations, and other forms of inter/disconnectedness. He is also broadly interested in pop cultures, visual technologies, cultural geography, and especially systems and representations of cultural and physical boundaries/edges. He has previously worked in advertising in the Middle East, and briefly in film. He remains fascinated by flights of imagination.
May Farah
After completing a BA in Communication at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and an MA in Sociology at the American University of Beirut, May was a Beirut-based journalist for over a decade. Her exposure to a number of issues while living and working in Beirut have carried over to her current research interests, which include media (mis)representations of the Lebanese group Hizbullah and the Palestinians in general, media, diaspora, nationalism and transnationalism, and mediated identities of Palestinian youth living in refugee camps in Beirut.
My interests are generally in the field of new media, but particularly relating to internet culture, hacker/graffiti culture, and gaming theory. My background is in cinema and moving image studies, so I am also focused on issues of visual and haptic engagement with media objects, as well as the larger legal and political issues that surround net culture such as privacy, transparency, and control. My work is largely theory based, but I also have an interest in production, specifically net art and coding languages.
Travis Hall
Travis received his undergraduate degree in International Relations and master's degree in International Communication from American University in Washington, DC. His research interests include biometrics, critical theory, bureaucracy, moral norms and the media, Science and Technology Studies, truth production, and bodies.
Thomas Harkins
Thomas Edward Harkins, AAS, BS, MA. Sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Media, Culture, and Communication Program. Adjunct Instructor, NYU. Thomas teaches "Speech Communication" and, at times, "Public Speaking." His academic interests are in the area of Education and Technology. He is particularly interested in the manner in which evolving communication technologies influence human interactions. His proposal is focused specifically on the influence of evolving classroom technologies on Writing Instruction - the manner in which writing is taught in public school classrooms in NYC.
Kari Hensley
Kari is a native of San Diego, California. She holds a B.A. in art history from UC Berkeley and a master's degree from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU (thesis: "Masculinity in the Crosshairs: National Wounds in the Photography from the Iraq War"). Her broad concern is the role of the visual in the production of social and cultural truths. Her areas of interest include national identity, cultural citizenship, historiography, consumer culture and visual consumption, violence, photography, and the politics of representation. Kari has worked as a performance artist, a bartender, a director of a non-profit arts organization, a janitor, an art dealer, a researcher, a headhunter for the design and advertising industries, and a labor organizer.
Jennifer Heuson 
Existential evidence is my current fascination. Arising from a decade-long study of phenomenology, authenticity and realism and from a deep desire to unite theory with lived experience, the concept unfolded through a series of ethnographic experiments attempting to dissect embodied wanderlust. I hope to expand these cursory observations into a full investigation of the practices of experiencing, narrating and representing travel.
Julie Jakolat
Robert Jones
Robert earned an M.F.A. in Screenwriting from San Diego State University and a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Indiana University. His dissertation explores the videogame subculture of Machinima, the use of video game technologies by gamers to create animated films. As an instance of fan-produced media, Machinima offers an insight into the new ways that gamers perform culture. He is also interested in how the videogame medium is currently being utilized as a means of political activism. His work has appeared in the journal Popular Communication as well as the edited volumes Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet and Media Literacy: A Reader. In addition to teaching at NYU he also teaches a course on Videogame Culture at the New School. His website covers issues in the gaming world and reviews machinima films. He is a musician, digital filmmaker, life-long gamer, and T-shirt junkie.
Carolyn Lee Kane
Carolyn is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is currently writing her dissertation on "Synthetic Color: Computer Art and Electronic Signal Processing between 1968 and 1978." Carolyn's research areas include New Media, Critical Theory, and Aesthetic Philosophy. For further information visit: https://files.nyu.edu/clk267/public/
Marissa Kantor Dennis
Marissa is a second-year student in the PhD program. Her background is in cultural studies and cultural competency in mental health. She spent several years in Latin America studying cross-cultural issues in mental health and sexuality. Currently, Marissa's focus is on the performativity of illegal bodies--that is, bodies that for different social, historical, political and cultural reasons are not "allowed" to exist. She is specifically looking at the cultural experience of undocumented Latino residents in New York. Marissa is a trained medical interpreter and hopes to conduct a project on the interpersonal communicative practices between doctor, patient, and interpreter. She really likes the word "borderlands" even though it seems to be on its way out.
Tilottama Karlekar
Tamara Kneese
Tamara received her BA in anthropology from Kenyon College. She went on to complete her MA in anthropology as part of the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. In her MA thesis, she analyzed the commodification of personhood and definitions of property/inheritance on the social networking website Facebook. More specifically, she used the phenomenon of Facebook mourning, common after tragedies like the Virginia Tech shootings, to examine how people imbue the website with an aspect of the sacred, despite Facebook's commercial underpinnings. Tamara's broader academic interests include the Frankfurt School, visual anthropology, embodiment, digital media, and the role of the internet in intellectual property law.
Lana Lin
BA in Communications, University of Iowa; MFA in Film, Bard College. Lana's recent work emerges from the interrelation between current events and residues of the past, highlighting the contingency of memory and the haunting of daily life by the specter of socio-political inequities. Media criticism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and race and gender studies inform her investigation into the ethics of representation. Her films have shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, among other venues. She has contributed to publications including Cabinet, Rethinking Marxism, and Considering Forgiveness, published by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. A recipient of awards from the Fulbright Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Jerome Foundation, among others, she has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art, City College of New York, and is currently faculty in the MFA in Visual Arts program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Gerald Leboff
Max Liboiron
Max's academic and artistic work focuses on trash as a site of intersection for environmentalisms, capitalism, consumerism, and participation. She has presented at conferences, conducted workshops, and had solo and group art exhibitions in Canada, the United States, and Ireland. Max has worked as an assistive technology specialist, a contributing editor of the grassroots advocacy newspaper The Dominion, an adjunct professor in studio art, and a garbage sorter. She received her BFA with distinction, with a minor in biology, from Mount Allison University, NB, Canada, and her MFA with a certificate of cultural studies from SUNY Stony Brook, NY.
Alice Marwick
email
Alice Marwick studies social media from a variety of critical perspectives, including the political economy of new media, online identity, and feminist media theory. Her dissertation, "Becoming Elite: Status in Social Media Communities," takes an anthropological approach to examining the creation and maintenance of status hierarchies within social media through ethnographic examination of workers in the Web 2.0 startups in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is interested in how social media technologies contribute to status inequalities, particularly around gender, educational level, and class. Alice holds an MA in Communication from the University of Washington (Thesis: "Selling Yourself: Identity in an Age of a Commercialized Internet") and a BA in Women's Studies and Political Science from Wellesley College. Alice grew up in suburban New York but spent eight years in Seattle working in the dot.com boom and bust. She divides her time between San Francisco and Manhattan and enjoys karaoke, thrift stores, and feminist blogs.
Paul Melton
Paul's research interests focus on culture and consumption – the ways in which culture is consumed, the ways in which consumption becomes culture, and, particularly, the technologies that mediate cultural production and consumption. Before pursuing his PhD, Paul spent 10 years working in communications across five countries and several industries, including information technology, telecommunications, and international development. Paul holds undergraduate degrees in mathematics (thesis " Applications of Moving Mesh Methods to 2D Orthogonal Grid Generation") and Spanish literature (theses "Vispera del gozo: Hacia una lectura posmoderna / posfeminista de la vanguardia española," and "Amores de segunda mano: Disidencia sexual/textual en los cuentos de Enrique Serna"), with honors in both.
Beza Merid
MA, Afro-American Studies, UCLA; BA, Comparative Literature, USC. Beza's research examines the use of popular media by Black academic public intellectuals and Black creative intellectuals-namely, stand-up comics. Specifically, he is interested in the process of social mediation and the ways in which these figures communicate with their publics. His research interests include stand-up comedy, cultural & intellectual histories, the politics of representation, the role of popular cultures in political & social life and the intersection of popular cultures & race.
Nadja Millner-Larsen
Nadja Millner-Larsen holds a BA from Bard College in history and human rights (thesis: The Rat: Collectivity, Autonomy and Aesthetic Form in a Lower East Underground Newspaper, 1968-1971). Before pursuing her doctoral degree, Nadja worked as a media analyst and a research assistant; monitoring the morning news on broadcast television and conducting research on the International Center of Photography's collection of posters by the Art Workers Coalition, respectively. Nadja thus remains interested in the interplay between contemporary everyday life and the history of radical thought. Her broad interests include visual culture, affect theory, memory studies, utopian politics, queer theory and archival research. Her recent work focuses on the mobilization/memorialization of radical movements of the past in contemporary art and activist practices. Nadja is currently quite seduced by the films of David Wojnarowicz.
Wazhmah Osman
Wazhmah's broad area of interest is cultural contestations as they manifest into politically charged debates in mediated public spheres. More specifically, her research looks at the politics of representation and visual culture around issues and imagery pertaining to "The War On Terror" and "Afghan Women" and how they reverberate globally. Her dissertation "Thinking Outside the Box: Television and Gender in the Afghan Culture Wars" takes a media ethnographic approach to studying how the Post 9/11 mediascape of Afghanistan is constituting gender subjectivities in the daily lives of Afghans. Wazhmah earned a Masters in Near Eastern Studies also from New York University (Thesis: "Contentious Births: Modernity and Gender Rights in Afghanistan") and two BAs in English and Film from Rutgers University. She has also completed the innovative Graduate Program in Culture and Media through NYU Anthropology. She travels frequently between Kabul and NYC.
Elizabeth Patton
Elizabeth received her BA degree in Psychology from New York University and her MA degree in the area of Psychology and the Arts from Drexel University. Her research interests include vernacular architecture, urban spaces, politics of tourism, visual culture and discourses on sexuality, gender, public/private and identity.
Aaron Pedinotti
My main interest is the development of proto-cyborg ideation in early-modern and nineteenth-century texts, particularly as it manifests in literature, scientific thinking, and the political philosophy of liberal and radical thinkers. My background is in the interdisciplinary study of modern European history, literature, and philosophy. As a result, my work tends to incorporate elements of each of these overlapping fields.
William Phillips
Matthew Powers
My research interests are in the sociology of media, political communications and comparative media systems. More specifically, I am seeking to address the place of digital news in the social landscape through a comparative study of media systems in the United States and Canada.
Kyle Rentschler
Kyle received his BA from UC Berkeley where he majored in Film Studies and specialized in gaming theory. He is specifically interested in game design and storytelling aesthetics, games as a communicative tool, and comparative studies involving games, film, and literature. He hopes to primarily focus on theory and eventually actualize his theoretical work in a game of his own.
Magdalena Sabat
Magdalena is a first year PhD student at NYU. She is a graduate of University of Toronto (BA) and University of Amsterdam (MA). She was born in Poland, but also lived in Canada, The Netherlands and France. Her research interests include feminism, sexuality, the body, discourse analysis, visual theory, aesthetics and urban spaces. She is a visual artist with a strong interest in art theory and museology. Magdalena has worked in various fields: teaching, gallery, editing, research and translation. In her spare time she is learning French and writing a short story book.
Jessica Shimmin
Jessica's dissertation explores the production of "safe space" by examining the ideologies, everyday practices, and social resources that professionals at a Massachusetts domestic violence non-profit draw upon to create a culturally meaningful transitional place for battered women. Research and teaching interests include space and place; gender; public and private; violence and safety; ethnography.
Scott Selberg
Scott's research and teaching interests include visual culture, critical theory, cultural memory, STM, and cultural studies. His dissertation explores the visual culture of Alzheimer's disease, focusing in particular on the intersections of cognition, age, and bioethics. Scott also has a background in film and radio production and as a curator and programmer at film festivals and museums. He earned his BA in Art History from Williams College and his MA in Communication Studies (with emphasis on media and cultural studies) from UNC Chapel Hill. He is currently a 3rd year doctoral student and a recipient of NYU's Founder's Fellowship for Doctoral Study.
James Stanley
James is interested in the craftsman as an American archetype and the social and economic tensions in which D.I.Y. craft and culture producers operate in the larger culture of capitalism. More broadly, he is interested in America's cultural history as a reflection of its changing political economy, as well as issues of performance and the built environment. These academic interests arise from 10 years work as a theater artist in NYC. James is founder and co-artistic director of the National Theater of the United States of America, an experimental collaborative with whom he writes, designs, performs and produces plays. The NTUSA has been recognized with an OBIE for Design and a Spalding Gray Award for innovative writing and production. He also works as a performer, carpenter and stage technician. James holds a B.S. in film from Boston University, studied classical theater at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic art and recently received his M.A. in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU.
Luke Stark
Luke's primary research focuses on the biopolitics, aesthetics, theatrics, law and philosophy of national and international emergencies. A native of Ontario, Luke holds an Honours BA in History and English and an MA in History, both from the University of Toronto. Luke's academic pursuits have been complimented by work in government on strategic communications planning and issues management. Other highlights from his eclectic resume include forest ranger, sleep-away camp counsellor, and farm hand. Some of Luke's secondary teaching and research interests include the body's liminality, difference, othering and exile in the context of biotechnological change; representation, audience and gaze in screen, stage and new media cultures; critical theories of time, power and narrative; and the intellectual underpinnings of speculative fiction.
Sarah Stonbely
Sarah's academic interests include media sociology, sociology of knowledge, intellectual history, and methods/methodology. Her academic background includes a BA in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MA in mass communication from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Rachelle Sussman
Rachelle's research focuses on the circulation of discourses and images of Africa within American culture through the lens of philanthropy. Other research interests include the branding of social activism; gendered representations in the media; gender, media and sport; and culture jamming. She also has an interest in the experiences of students of color in higher education, and has directed minority recruitment for Sarah Lawrence College's Office of Admissions as well as served as Co-Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholars Program at New York University. MA, Women's History, Sarah Lawrence College; BA, Political Science/Women's Studies, University of Vermont.
Joseph Truncale
Joseph is President and CEO of NAPL, the trade association for excellence in graphic communications management. Besides being a PhD candidate, he is an adjunct faculty member at NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies, teaching courses in Managerial Psychology and Executive Leadership. His PhD thesis is a study of entrepreneurial leadership in the graphic communications industry. A frequent speaker at industry and association events, he also serves on the Audit Team for Quality New Jersey, is a member of the board of examiners for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, and is a past President of the New Jersey Society of Association Executives as well as recipient of its Executive of the Year Award.
Robert Wosnitzer email
BA, Media Studies, New York University; MA, Media, Culture & Communication, New York University. Wosnitzer is a first-year doctoral student at New York University's Department of Media, Culture and Communication. In his current research, Robert draws on critical cultural theory to engage the materiality of economic markets, environments, and technologies within the dynamics of cultural and economic globalization. Using risk as a concept for inquiry, Robert's work ranges from representations of financial risk in news and popular media, the role of media technologies in mediating forms of risk, as well as the performatives of economic knowledge. He is broadly exploring the role of microfinance in the global economy, and its claims of empowerment and poverty reduction.
Prior to joining the department, Robert was a capital markets professional, where he traded and placed debt-related securities on behalf of investment banks, sovreign governments, and transnational corporations. Since returning to the academy, Robert has produced and written documentary films, taught courses at NYU's Stern School of Business, and taught media literacy and production at the first public school in New York City to offer media as a core discipline. His published writing includes a large-scale content analysis study investigating aggression, authorship, and ideology within popular pornographic videos, and critical analysis of race in the Academy-Award winning film, Crash.
Ekin Yasin 
Ekin grew up in Istanbul, Turkey. She has a B.S. in Foreign Service with a concentration in Culture and Politics from Georgetown University. She also completed an M.A in Near Eastern Studies at New York University and another M.A in Anthropology from Columbia University. Ekin's academic interests are located in the fields of Linguistics, Semiotics, Philosophy and Media Studies. Her non-academic interests consist of gastronomy, visual and written products of science-fiction genre, early examples of Turkish cinema, the life and works of Marcel Proust.