Over the past five years, graduates of the Media, Culture, and Communication (MCC) doctoral program have published well received books on topics spanning the field of media studies.
This recent scholarly output from our alumni underscores the breadth of our discipline. I'm delighted to see MCC alumni advancing our practice in such novel and inspired directions.
Melissa Aronczyk (PhD 2009)
A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism with Maria Espinosa (Oxford University Press, November 2021)
Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnography, and archival research, Aronczyk and Espinoza document the evolution of PR techniques to control public perception of the environment since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Katherine Brideau (PhD 2013)
The Typographic Medium (MIT Press, October 2021)
“How I've yearned for a book like Kate Brideau's The Typographic Medium. Type—virtually the exclusive province of book historians, print historians, type historians, designers, and calligraphers for so long—is at last being interrogated as medium.” — Thomas Mullaney
Hatim El-Hibri (PhD 2012)
Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure (Duke University Press, 2021)
"Hatim El-Hibri masterfully deconstructs outmoded assumptions about Lebanon's political economy and societies... The outcome is an important contribution that implores us to think critically about how image, its mediation, and infrastructures are remaking cities in today's world.”
— Mona Fawaz
Jacob Gaboury (PhD 2014)
Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (MIT Press, 2021)
“With Image Objects, Gaboury has established himself as the leading voice among a new generation of visual culture theorists. This is a landmark contribution to the fields of digital culture, media theory, and science and technology studies.” — Bernard Geoghegan
Matthew Hockenberry (2017)
Assembly Codes (Duke University Press, 2021)
"Assembly Codes gathers top thinkers who unfurl new paths for understanding media and logistics and boldly confront issues of difference, geopolitics, and planetary resources in the process.” — Lisa Parks
Carolyn Kane (PhD 2011)
High Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure (University of California Press, 2019)
“Kane profiles art practices and media discourses that exploit and celebrate, rather than filter or suppress, all kinds of errors and noises. A welcome intervention in a number of discursive fields.” — Peter Krapp
Max Liboiron (PhD 2013)
Pollution is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021)
“This important book challenges the very sense of what pollution is, demonstrating its deep entanglements with settler colonialism.... This book is a model of what engaged feminist anticolonial STS research looks like.” — Michelle Murphy
Lana Lin (PhD 2015)
Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer (Fordham University Press, 2017)
"The case is cancer, the main object is the breast, and through Freud, Lorde, and Sedgwick Lin elaborates a 'subjectivity of survival.'"
— Lauren Berlant
Shannon Mattern (PhD 2002)
A City is Not a Computer (Princeton University Press, 2021)
"Mattern offers a radically new perspective on the city as information and our modes of engagement with it. This stunning book presents a set of ideas that will continue to have a profound effect on scholarship and practice." — Daniel A. Barber
Wazhmah Osman (PhD 2013)
Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists (University of Illinois Press, 2021)
"This is the first richly observed ethnographic account of the landscape of media in post-US invasion Afghanistan." — Paula Chakravartty
David Parisi (PhD 2009)
Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (University of Minnesota Press, 2018)
"Archaeologies of Touch is a work of deep erudition and study, carefully plotted, and written with penetrating insight, establishing Parisi at the vanguard of the developing field of haptic media studies." — Media Theory
Elizabeth Patton (Phd 2013)
Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office (Rutgers University Press, 2020)
"Easy Living exposes the long-standing discourses of gender, race, and class undergirding American experiences of work and home, discourses laden with power and inequality that the pandemic has exposed." — Television & New Media
Devon Powers (PhD 2008)
On Trend: The Business of Forecasting the Future (University of Illinois Press, 2019)
"This fascinating book pulls the curtain back on an entire industry devoted to shaping our perceptions of what matters — and with it, the future itself."
— Fred Turner
Matthew Powers (PhD 2013)
NGOs as Newsmakers (Columbia University Press, 2018)
"Powers has produced a landmark study of one of the complex high-stakes dynamics shaping the future of journalism." — Adrienne Russell
Jennifer Telesca (PhD 2014)
Red Gold: The Managed Extinction of the Giant Blue Fin Tuna (Minnesota University Press, 2020)
"Red Gold is an exemplary documentation of how bad-faith science conducted at the behest of corporate interests provides cover for the over-exploitation of ‘natural resources.’" — Daniel Pauly
Hannah Zeavin (PhD 2018)
The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021)
“This book is a fascinating, groundbreaking history of therapy, told from the perspective of the communication technologies that have long enabled it. A must-read for all scholars of technology, health, and communication.”
— Mar Hicks