UT RTF at SCMS 2026 Conference

 This year in Chicago at the 2026 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Annual Conference, RTF faculty, students, and alumni will convene to present their latest research, engage in critical dialogues on media studies topics, and network with regarded cinema and media scholars from around the world. On Friday at 7:15 PM CT, SCMS will celebrate 2026 SCMS award winners, including UT RTF alumni Tupur Chatterjee, winner of Best First Book for Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India (NYU Press, 2025) and Jennifer Holt, winner of Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award for Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data (MIT Press, 2024).Scroll down the page to see many of the RTF-affiliated scholars who are presenting this year.

Party - Save the Date!

Please join the UT Austin Department of Radio-Television-Film on Saturday, March 28, for our annual "Back to the Ranch" SCMS Reunion Party with graduate students, alumni, faculty and friends. Catch up and enjoy some light refreshments. We hope to see you there!Hook 'em!WHEN: Saturday, March 28, at 8 pmWHERE:  Gold Room, Fairmont Chicago Millennium Park Hotel RSVP

UT RTF scholars scheduled to participate in 2026 SCMS Conference(partial list)

Faculty  Students   Alumni 

FACULTY

Lalitha Gopalan A02 – Cinematographers and Directors 

• “Choreographing Romance: Guru Dutt and V.K. Murthy” 

Alisa Perren B04 – Post-Peak TV 

• “Same Industry Different Problems: Unscripted TV” 

Shanti Kumar B15 – Global Television and the Political Imagination 

• “The Persistence of TV (and the sofa) in India” 

Kathryn Fuller-Seeley E09 – Beyond Monument Valley 

• “The First Movie Studio in Texas: Gaston Méliès Star Film Ranch 1910-1911” 

Mary Beltrán G19 – Expanding Understanding of Teen Films, Television, and Media Culture 

• “Coming Age, With Felling and a Skateboard: Skate Kitchen and Teen Agency” 

Suzanne Scott K17 – Making Academic Research Potent and Potable for a General Audience  

• “Craft(ing) Cocktails as Fan Practice” 

Slaveya Minkova N19 – Sideways and Seams 

• “Digital practice as industry research methodology” 

Byron Fong O13 – Opening Up the Game Engine 

• “Game Engine, a Semantic History” 

STUDENTS

Xinyue Wang B11 – Dark Attractions 

• “Miniature Camera, Magnified Vision: Visual Politics of Hidden Cameras in East Asia” 

Yenny Kang G20 – Media Production and Circulation Infrastructure in the Pacific  

• “Mapping K-Hollywood: ‘Digital Media City’ and the Centralization of South Korea’s Television Industry” 

Jina Lee H02 – Representation and Remediation in 2020s Global Television 

• “The Branding of ‘Global’ by Korean Reality TV: Cosmopolitanism, Diversity, and Exceptionalism” 

Zachariah Qureshi H11 – Challenging Performance(s) 

• “All We Imagine as Light: Reexamining Realism and National Style in Indian Cinema” 

Hannah Forsythe I13 – Seeing Systems 

• “Cut, Push, Repeat: The Operational Aesthetics of Obstetrics on Screen” 

Blake Wagner I13 – Seeing Systems 

• “Wallowing in the Mire: the Aesthetics and Operational Images of Extractive Industries in South Louisiana” 

Isadora Dumont J07 – Relational Technologies 

• “Relational Media-Making: Indigenous Community Authorship” 

Laurel Rogers J08 – More Than a Feeling 

• “Toward a Theory of Fan Nostalgia” 

Laura Springman J08 – More Than a Feeling 

• “The Found Footage Effect: Toxic Gothic Nostalgia and the Construction of History in WNUF Halloween Special” 

Alex Remington M02 – Blurred Lines 

• “The Business of Genre: Reconstructing TV Categories During the Classic Network Era” 

Ryan Briggs M02 – Blurred Lines 

• “How Hollywood Became Inhospitable to Mid-Budget Movies” 

Kathryn Hartzell Q02 – Innovations in Form, Content, and Marketing in Sports Media 

• “Bridge to India: Marketing Firms and Producing a Glocal English Premier League for India” 

ALUMNI

*If you're an alum presenting at this year's SCMS conference and are not listed below, please contact us!Matthew Payne A02 – Reframing the Argument 

• “Reframing the Video Essay Workshop” 

Tristan Bass-Krueger A03 – Reframing the Argument 

• “The Visual History of Colonoscopy” 

Luis Rivera-Figueroa A16 – Vivirse la pelicula 

• “’Talento de Barrio’: Crossing Back from the US Mainstream to the Caserío” 

Avi Santo A17 – Acquiring Fan Lifestyles 

• “Theorizing Acquisition and Lifestyle within Fan Studies” 

Timothy Piper A18 – New Political Histories of Sports Media 

• “Sex, Gender, and Sports Media at the 1936 Berlin Olympics” 

Jacqueline Johnson A20 – Happily Never After 

• “Timing is Everything: Temporal Rupture and New Formations of Romantic Comedy” 

Kevin Sanson B04 – Post-Peak TV 

• “A Manifesto for Post-Growth Hollywood” 

Christina Lane B05 – “Not Always What They Seem to Be” 

• “Designs for Living: Film Noir, Domestic Space, and the Modern Woman’s Reach” 

Alex Brannan B10 – The Platformed Experience 

• “The Algorithmizing the ‘Thumbs’: Cycles of Film Criticism Death and the Contemporary Online Moment” 

Alfred Martin C04 – 30 Years of Watching Race 

• “Black Audiences Watching Race” 

Margaret Steinhauer C07 – The Innovation, Regulation, and Governance of US Media 

• “Examining Broadcast Schedules through Regulatory History: Radio’s ‘Pacific Plan’ and the Division of Time, 1920-1927” 

Colin Tait D01 – (Re/Dis-)covery 

• “Directors as Collectors: The Case of Guillermo del Toro and The Bleak House Collection” 

Swapnil Rai D15 – Global Television and the Political Imagination 

• “Elective Affinities: TV & Gendered Populism” 

Kayti Lausch E06 – 21st Century News Media, Identity, and the First Amendment Under Siege 

• “On Taking Christian News Seriously: How the Mainstream Press Covered The 700 Club” 

Maria Boyd E06 – 21st Century News Media, Identity, and the First Amendment Under Siege 

• “Paramount, Media Consolidation, and the Eroding 1st Amendment: The 60 Minutes Case” 

Amanda Landa E07 – Provocation and Disaster in Asian and Asian American Media 

• “Eden of the East: Articulating Discourses of Youth and Disaster in Millennial Japan” 

Luke Moy E13 – The Toys of Fandom 

• “He speaks from giddy, childlike experience’: On Fan-Made Media and Celebrating Action Figure Articulation” 

Charlotte Howell E19 – The Meanings and Modes of the Netflix Sports Docuseries 

• “The Sexist Scopes of the Netflix World Cup Docuseries: Comparing Under Pressure and Captains of the World” 

Brett Siegel E19 – The Meanings and Modes of the Netflix Sports Docuseries 

• “Streaming in the New Stacking: How Netflix’s Sophomore Season of Quarterback Reconsolidates the NFL’s Racial Hierarchies” 

Michael DeAngelis E21 – Drama, Parody, Modeling, and Just Ken 

• “Accessibility of the Star Persona: The Embrace of Ryan Gosling’s Ken” 

Hector Amaya F04 – Complicating Gender and Genre 

• “A Handmaid’s Tale: Anonymity in the Age of Identification” 

Lesley Willard F08 – Placeholder for Teaching & Pedagogy Workshop 

• TBD 

Lesley Willard G09 – Mods, Moderation, Monetization  

• “Storing Slurs: Toxicity, Automated Content Moderation, and the Afterlives of Audio Recordings” 

Kristen Warner G12 – Romance Media in the Digital Age 

• “Black Girls Get to Moan Too: Race and Audioerotica” 

Hyun Jung Stephany Noh G15 – Netflix and the Politics of Representation 

• “Surviving Dystopia: Transmedia Marketing and Immersive Engagement in Squid Game and All of Us Are Dead” 

Sharon Marie Ross G19 – Expanding Understanding of Teen Films, Television, and Media Culture 

• “Labubu’s Popularity and the Emotional Logic of Fan Culture in China: A Structure of Feeling Approach” 

Kelly Kessler H08 – Public Engagement in Precarious Times 

• TBD 

Olivier Tchouaffe H12 – Aesthetics and Performance in Sinners 

• “Smokestack Lighting: Sinners and the Poetics of Anticipation and the Black Ethics of Futurity” 

Peter Alilunas I02 – Bodies Beyond Space, Time and Sound 

• “Pixelated Flesh: Computer Art, Pornography, and the Cultural Politics of Studies in Perception I” 

Anne Major I10 – Domestic and Personal Returns 

• “Anatomy of a Cozy Murder Mystery: Acorn TV’s Programming and Branding Strategies in the 2020s” 

Kelly Kessler I21 – TV and Catastrophe  

• “The Day After: Trauma TV or Just a Gen X Tuesday” 

Hollis Griffin J21 – Our Subjects, Ourselves 

• “New Yawk; or (Almost) Everything I know About Media and Cultural Geography I Learned from My Grandmother” 

Sarah Murray K20 – Dis/comforts 

• “Grief Tech’s Big Bet on Optimizing Discomfort” 

Peter Johnson L04 – Hybrid Signals 

• “Crossing the Sea of Red Ink: U.S. Independent Producers’ Attempt at Global Self-Distribution, 1960s-1970s” 

Selena A. Dickey M02 – Blurred Lines 

• “Television at the Fringes: Distribution, Geography, and History” 

Courney Brannon Donoghue M02 – Blurred Lines 

• “Before Barbie: Mattel ‘Raids’ the Toybox and Travels to Conglomerate Hollywood” 

Kyle Barnett M16 – Signifying Soundscapes 

• “Co-Star Records and the Cinematic Phonograph” 

Kevin John Bozelka  M16 – Signifying Soundscapes 

• “The Real and the Electric Sh*t: Sinners (2025), Recordings, and Inscriptions of History” 

David Gurney M16 – Signifying Soundscapes 

• “Spectres in the Static: Hauntology, Sound, and Analog Horror in Skinamarink” 

Jing Wang O04 – Micro-dramas, Macro-impact 

• “A New Frontier of Sino-Hollywood Collaboration: Chinese Micro Dramas, Transnational Coproduction, and Market Success” 

Benjamin Kruger-Robbins P05 – Media Awards and Cultural Capital Across Film and Television History 

• “Queerly Anointing the Charmed One: Aaron Spelling’s Alternate Awards Blitz” 

Peter Kovacs P07 – US TV Commercials Past and Present  

• “The Arrival of the ‘Creative Revolution’ in Mainstream Cigarette Advertising” 

Cynthia Meyers P07 – US TV Commercials Past and Present 

• “Benton and Bowles and the Creative Revolution” 

Peter Kunze Q03 – AI’s Successes and Failures 

• “Animators, Affect, and Generative AI”