PhD - Year 5 and Beyond
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Nicholas BestorNick Bestor is a doctoral candidate in Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation “Playing in Licensed Storyworlds: Games, Franchises, and Fans” (tentative tile) studies the ways analog and digital games are used to explore and develop popular franchise storyworlds. He earned his MA in Film and Media Studies from Emory University; his Master’s thesis examined The CW network’s formation in 2006 and its targeting of the female 18-34 demographic. His research interests include analog gaming, transmedia storytelling, animation, and the US television industry. |
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Hao CaoMy name is Hao Cao, a PhD (’12) student in Media Studies. I come from China. My study interests revolve around civil society, public sphere, alternative media, and social change. Methodologically, I mainly use textual analysis and ethnography. I anticipate completing my PhD study in 2016 or 2017. |
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Julian Etienne GomezJulian Etienne is an international student from Mexico City with a background in linguistics and library and information studies. Julian’s main research interests include media archaeology, media cultures and memory practices in Latin America. His dissertation project deals with non-theatrical film and substandard moving image technologies in Mexico. He is a member of the Global Media Research student organization at UT and is involved in programming activities through the collective Latitude Cinema and Screens Arts from the Global South. |
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Gejun HuangGejun Huang is originally from Ningbo, China and has received his MA in Media Studies from Radio-Television-Film Department of University of Texas at Austin. His academic interests mainly cover the diffusion of new media technologies among new immigrants in U.S., especially young Asian Americans. Also, he focuses on studying video game under the framework of globalization, addressing issues such as industrial development, flows of technology and culture, and gamers' interaction in virtual worlds. His MA thesis engaged in illustrating how Chinese American teenagers in Austin adopt and employ social network sites regarding daily communications and ethnic expressions. Currently, he is examining the industrial networks that precondition and facilitate the growth of online game industry in China. |
Jinsook KimJinsook Kim earned her B.A. in History Education from Korea University and M.A. in Women’s Studies from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea. She worked as a researcher at the Korean Women’s Institute, Ewha Womans University and Korean Women’s Development Institute. Jinsook’s research interests are in feminist perspectives on new media technologies, hate speech, and social movements. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Feminist Media Studies, Communication, Culture & Critique, and an edited anthology Mediating Misogyny: Gender, Technology, and Harassment (2018). She is a recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies, the Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, the POSCO Graduate Research Fellowship for Korean Studies, the Korean American Communication Association Dissertation Award, and top paper awards from conferences including ICA and AEJMC. She is currently working on a dissertation exploring online misogyny and anti-hate feminist activism in South Korea. |
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Kyung Sun (Karen) LeeKyung Sun (Karen) Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in RTF. She received her B.A. from Korea University and M.S. in Journalism and Mass Communication from Iowa State University. Kyung Sun’s research is informed by critical theory and political economy of communication. Her research interests intersect in the areas of globalization, nation branding, and media as a site of struggle over meaning making and voice. Her works have appeared inInternational Journal of Communication,Journalism Studies, and in book chapters.Kyung Sun is a member of the Global Media Research Group. |
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Anne MajorAnnie Major has a BA in film studies from the University of South Carolina and a MA in Media Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her current research interests include digital distribution platforms, global media networks and transnational cinema. Annie worked for the Austin Film Society, and haspublishedin theFlowjournal. She is a coordinating editor ofThe Velvet Light Trapand a member of the Global Media Research Group. |
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Daniel MauroDaniel Mauro received a BA from the University of Rochester and an MA from the University of Kansas. He is currently preparing his doctoral dissertation focused on the politics of amateur media. Other research interests include cultural historiography, media archives, and democratic communication. He is an editor forThe Velvet Light Trap, and has published inThe Moving ImageandFlow. He has worked in media preservation and production, and his video projects have appeared in installations and festivals internationally. |
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Paul MonticonePaul Monticone's research interests include classical-era Hollywood cinema, production practices and genre cycles in popular American cinema from the transitional era to divorcement, and historiography, as well as non-theatrical cinema created by and related to the electrical utility industry in the 1920s and 30s. His dissertation project focuses on theAmerican film industry's major trade organization, the Motion PictureProducer and Distributor's Association, from its founding through the mid-1960s. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Toronto,and Masters degree is from Concordia University in Montreal. His work is published and forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, TheVelvet Light Trap, and the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. |
Michael O'BrienResearch Interests: Contemporary distribution patterns and technologies, global cinephilia, paracinema histories, reception studies, sports media, and media authorship. |
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Morgan O'BrienMorgan C. O’Brien is a doctoral candidate in the RTF Department at the University of Texas at Austin. He is from Scotland, and earned his undergraduate M.A. from the University of Aberdeen before moving to the USA to gain a graduate M.A. in Media Studies from UT-Austin. Morgan worked with and studied under the late Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz for several years at Aberdeen, benefiting from an intellectual friendship that continues to influence and inspire his research. While at UT-Austin, Morgan has been a coordinating editor for Velvet Light Trap, an editor for Flow, a voting member of both the departmental Graduate Student Organization and the campus-wide Graduate Student Assembly, and also co-organized the bi-annual Flow conference in 2012. Morgan's research focuses on digital games and documenting the forms and images of late-capitalism-cum-capitalist reality. His dissertation reads the subversive, political aesthetics of retro digital games in the shadow of a triple-A industry. He is also working on exploring the formal, technical, and historical relationships between animation and digital games. |
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Jacqueline PinkowitzJackie’s primary research interests include American film and cultural history in the 1950s and 1960s and the representation of the American South in film and television. She is also interested in critical race studies, gender studies, film stardom and fandom, the history of the Hollywood studio system, and gothic film and literature. Her background is in media studies and literature and she earned her M.A. from New York University in Cinema Studies. Jackie is an editor for the Flow journal, in which she has also published, serves on the programming committee for the Flow Conference, and is working with the student editorial board of the Velvet Light Trap journal. Published work: http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/247/253 |
Timothy PiperTim Piper's research examines media industries and cultural identity with an emphasis on live sports texts and institutions. He is also interested in media historiography, U.S. television history, and cultural geography. His dissertation project focuses on the production and politics of urban place in the partnerships of NBA basketball and the U.S. television industry during the 1970s. He has collaborated on UT-Austin’s Media Industry Conversations series, served as a shepherd for Velvet Light Trap, coordinated the 2014 and 2016 Flow conferences, and served as Flow’s managing editor from 2014-17. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in media studies from Northern Illinois University and University of Texas at Austin, respectively. |
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Alexis SchrubbeAlexis grew up in the Milwaukee area and attended the University of Wisconsin, earning a BA in Political Science and East European and Russian Studies. She has lived in Moscow, Russia, and also traveled throughout Siberia. She has an MA from the University of Texas in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies where her research focused on how young Russians use the Internet. Her research interests involve Internet infrastructure, the public sphere, US information policy, and issues of Internet access/use. In her free time she enjoys recording podcasts for an online educational series entitled, "SlavTalk Radio", getting into vigorous debates regarding deregulation, and trying to find somewhere to play ice hockey in Austin. |
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Hogeun SeoBefore Hogeun Seo started his M.A. program at UT Austin, he had worked for nine years in four different new media industries: digital cable TV, satellite mobile TV, Internet protocol television (IPTV), and smartphones. In his Ph.D. program, he plans to pursue three main areas of research: 1) human-computer interactions (HCI) in the use of the advanced digital technologies such as wearable devices and motion detectors, 2) the effects of video games - social games and virtual/augmented reality games - on the gamer’s social networks and social cognition, and 3) children’s use of digital media and whether it increases their digital competitiveness and/or decreases their social competitiveness. |
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Ramna WaliaRamna is from New Delhi, India and has done five years of Bachelors and Masters education in English Literature from the University of Delhi. While pursuing literature she felt more and more drawn towards cinema. The "reading approach" of literature also felt unchallenging after a while and she decided to apply for an M.Phil in Film Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. After her M.phil, she worked as a Film researcher for a documentary film organization as well as India's public service broadcaster. Currently she is a visiting faculty in a Mass communication school where she teaches cinema courses. Her areas of interest are film adaptation and remakes, the after-life of the material film object, cultures of techno-materiality, memory and the scattered film culture post the digital revolution, with a primarily focus on Indian cinema (Bombay films in particular). Previous work: http://bio.sagepub.com/content/4/2/137.abstract http://synoptique.hybrid.concordia.ca/index.php/main/article/view/39/51 |
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Kyle WratherKyle Wrather earned a BA in English and BA in Communication with a focus on journalism and a minor in broadcasting from Mississippi State University. While at Mississippi State, he served as the Editor in Chief of The Reflector, the university’s independent student newspaper. His MA thesis at Georgia State University examined regulation modalities of network neutrality. He works on the staff of the academic journal Media Industries as graduate student web designer and administrator. His interests include media industries, Internet governance, new media technologies, and streaming television. Article: |
