MA - Year 2

Patrick Eubanks 

Patrick graduated from the University of Arizona in 2014, where he received a Bachelor in General Studies with a focus in Arts, Media and Entertainment. A lifelong resident of Washington DC, Patrick worked as a literacy instructor in DC Public Schools for the 2014-15 and 2015-2016 school years, where he was struck by his students' engagement with digital media and technology. His academic interests include children's media (specifically how children learn about the world through media and its potential as a teaching tool), race and representation and corporate America's co-option of Black culture.

Samantha Herndon

Samantha graduated from Connecticut College with a BA in Film Studies and a minor in Government. While in AmeriCorps following college she worked with children of incarcerated parents, before returning to her cinematic roots and joining the staff at film festivals including Telluride, Sundance, Tribeca, and Roxbury International. Her work with festivals sparked her interest in media industries and exhibition practices. Other research interests include gender in horror films, Weimar-era German cinema, and pre-code Hollywood. Samantha has also been active in the Seattle independent film community as a writer,  projectionist and filmmaker; in 2017 she produced the independent feature The Boy Who Lived Before.

Samantha is originally from Atlanta and enjoys exploring the friendly, delicious and musical cultures of Austin. 

Allison Johnson

Allison "Allie" Johnson is a pop culture fan from a small town in Northeast Texas who started as an art major at her local community college. However, she ultimately graduated from Texas A&M University - Texarkana with a BA in History and a BA in English in May 2017. Through participating in the university honors college program, Allie started creating traditional and visual essays for honors projects. In particular, Allie discovered the theory of Deconstruction and often used the works of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others to respond to various objects of media. In particular, she discussed various characters' zombie terminology in The Walking Dead, Conor Oberst's ever-changing image as an act of author-sacrifice, author-sacrifice in the modern musical and the unique case of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, and traces of life, loss, and language in That Dragon, Cancer. Each of these projects came from a love of two things - deconstruction and a fandom. She pulled research topics from her favorite fandoms in video games, YouTube, Broadway, television, music, and movies. Now, Allie has decided to study in the MA in Media Studies program at UT-Austin to discover more connections between fandom and academia. Her research interests include: critical theory as it applies to media, fan culture and fandom studies, and the emerging field of digital humanities, but she cannot wait to discover all that the media studies program has to offer. In her free time, like any other fan, Allie writes fanfiction, blogs about television shows and movies on Tumblr, and dreams about SDCC, E3, Walker Stalker, and other awesome fan conventions. 

Jacqueline Johnson

Before joining the Radio, Television, and Film department at UT, Jackie graduated with a BA in Sociology from Boston University where she became increasingly interested in representations of race, gender, and sexuality in popular culture.  Her current research interests include the convergence of television and new media, race and contemporary television audiences, and the performance of race and gender on online platforms.  She is particularly interested in how black audiences respond to on-screen representations through Twitter.  When she is not binge watching a new sitcom (currently Brooklyn Nine-Nine) or reading celebrity gossip, she enjoys eating at new restaurants and cooking.     

Katrina Margolis

Katrina Margolis graduated from the University of Virginia in 2015 where she majored in English and minored in Film Studies. After graduation, she worked for an online publication where she focused on contemporary women's issues and co-founded the online journal, Babe. Her research interests now incorporate her passion for feminist theory, however, they focus mainly on the intersection between the literary and film world during the Golden Age of Hollywood as well as the emergence of the Hollywood novel. She is particularly fascinated by figures such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Budd Schulberg, and Raymond Chandler. Originally from Boston, in her free time Katrina enjoys obsessively following the Red Sox and explaining why she doesn't have the accent.

Chantaelle Moffett

Ceci was born and mostly raised in central Texas near a military base. She completed her Bachelor's degree in English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her interests have always been on the presence of people of color, especially women of color, in specific genres, including horror, science fiction, and comic books/graphic novels. Ceci hopes to focus her research on the way that race and gender interface with these creative dominions, looking specifically at horror conventions in genre and the relationship that race has with comic book production and reception. 

Emily Turnage

Emily is from New Hebron, Mississippi, a small town with a population of only 300 people.  She earned her B.A. from Yale University in 2017, majoring in Literature with a concentration in Film.  Her undergraduate thesis explored intermediality in the films of Wes Anderson.  Emily’s current research interests include the horror film, reception studies, and television theory.  In her free time, Emily enjoys exploring libraries and obsessing over Guillermo del Toro’s Twitter account.

Casey Walker

Casey Walker was born and raised here in Austin and permanently resides here with his wife and three children.  He attended the University of Texas at Austin as an undergrad much longer ago than he would like to admit.  After obtaining his B.S. in Radio-Television-Film in 2000, he spent the last 17 years working in television and radio and is currently the Marketing Manager for the StarDate radio program, a daily radio program and podcast put out by the University of Texas.  His research interests include authorship, industry, media history, and representation.

Lauren Wilks

Lauren Wilks earned her Bachelor of Arts from Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, where she double-majored in English Literature and Communication. During her time at Trinity, Lauren blended her background in English with her passion for television and completed a feminist textual analysis of Grey’s Anatomy as her senior thesis. Her current research interests include race, gender, and queer representation and identity in television, film, and pop culture, especially the shows, movies, social media accounts and songs that become particularly popular. She is passionate about applying critical thought to the media messages we constantly and compulsively consume. Lauren hopes that her research will help increase awareness of the role media plays in our socialization process.

Yu Zhong

Yu is a graduate student of Media Studies in the Department of Radio-TV-Film for 2017 fall. He was born and raised in Shanghai, China. He is sunny, active and optimistic. He earned his bachelor in Cultural Industry Management from the Zhejiang University of Media and Communications. He also had been an exchange student in School of Arts & Sciences in the University of Pennsylvania. In college he researched the real-world effects of emerging media on users. He wrote his thesis on Rumor- spreading in Wechat: A case study of college students. Besides, he researched the International Competitiveness of Wanda Pictures as his final thesis. He is particularly interested in ways misinformation spreads and behaviors of media organizations. His research would focus on digital media development and large media corporations.