Graduate Students

Amar Boghani grew up in the suburbs of Boston, and graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology with a B.S. in Computer Science. He worked at Orange Labs (France Telecom) in Cambridge, MA as part of an R&D group focused on mobile devices and emerging web technologies. Afterwards, he joined the MIT Mobile Experience Lab (mobile.mit.edu) where he has been working on projects that explore the cultural and social implications of digital media technologies, from location-based platforms to real-time video communication. For the past several years he has been researching trends in technology, designing user experiences, and hacking together prototypes.

Amar's interests at CMS are focused on the relationship between media and the urban environment, looking specifically at mobile applications and user-generated content. His other interests include photography, graphic design, and music. He also enjoys riding a bike and kicking a soccer ball, but not at the same time.

Katie Edgerton studies the future of the film and television industry, and emerging forms of digital storytelling. Her forthcoming thesis focuses on television writing and new technology. Katie is a founding member of Social TV, an interest group in Comparative Media Studies.

Prior to MIT, Katie was an Assistant Curator for Exhibitions at the National 9/11 Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center. She helped develop the Museum's exhibit narrative, and scripted the 9/11 Timeline, a Webby Award honoree.

Katie is a graduate of Williams College. A freelance writer and narrative developer, she blogs about film, new media, and storytelling at opendoclab.mit.edu.

Elyse Graham is a candidate for the Ph.D. in the English Department at Yale University. She studies literature, the history of print culture, and the history of books. She has essays forthcoming from Modern Philology and other journals, and contributes regularly to The American Scholar.

She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 2007. She is currently on leave from Yale to attend the CMS program, where she will study old and new media. Her interests include early modern literature, print and information systems, and the history and theory of technology.

Ayse Gursoy joins CMS after having completed her A.B. at Princeton in the English department. She is interested in looking at games critically and developing a working vocabulary for game criticism that takes into account the emergent properties of games, as well as the historical context. For her spring independent work in junior year, she wrote about Oblivion (TES IV), taking into account its debts to hypertext and tabletop RPGs, as well as the affordances made available by the programming and by the means of interacting with the game. For instance, the game actively encourages modding and gives players easy access to the console; what does this imply for the act of playing? She is also interested in the possibilities of gaming for representing and embodying new identities, and hopes that in developing a critical language for games, will be able to investigate the unique nuances of this question.

Sun Huan recieved a B.A. in Journalism from Tsinghua University, Beijing. Her research interest lies in the rise of digital media and its socio-political implications on China. Her undergraduate thesis built up structural equation models to examine the use of SNS(renren.com) by Chinese college students and how it relates to their civic engagement.

She worked with Professor Dutton from the Oxford Internet Institute on the fifth estate in the context of China. She plans to concentrate on the topic of new communication technology and how it strengthens a developing civil society. She has also completed internships at The New York Times (Beijing), Beijing Daily, Beijing Evening Newspaper, and with Eurosport.com.

Rogelio Alejandro Lopez, from Guadalajara, Mexico and raised in Los Angeles, graduated from UCLA summa cum laude with degrees in Chicana/o Studies and Spanish.

As a scholar in the Ronald E. McNair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Program, Rogelio has conducted research regarding the use of new media among Latina/o activists in Los Angeles. Emphasizing a "from-the-ground-up" approach to scholarship and civic engagement, Rogelio has been involved with integrating media and technology into social justice geared movements. His work looks into lessening educational and health related disparities among historically underrepresented and underserved communities. Past examples of such fusion between media and public service include his involvement with the Fast for Our Future, a human rights focused hunger strike that utilized a new media campaign, and the South Central Farmers Health and Education Fund, which aims to provide low income communities with affordable organic produce and essential dietary education with the assistance of new media.

Rogelio will work closely with the Center for Civic Media to further develop the use of technology and media as a means of addressing societal disparities, with an emphasis on ensuring access to emerging technology, media, and digital information among communities that often fall victim to the "digital divide."

Molly Sauter grew up in Bucks County, PA, and has lived, variously, in Annapolis, MD, Austin, TX, and Somerville, MA. She studied Philosophy and the History and Philosophy of Science at St John’s College and the University of Pittsburgh, where she was a Brackenridge Fellow.

Before arriving at MIT, she worked as a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and as a freelance narrative designer and game critic in the indie game scene. Molly’s research focuses on cultural and socio-political analyses of technology, particularly hacktivist and other political technologies exported across cultural lines. She also nurses interests in digital poetry, science and technology in popular culture, the HCI of information security, and remix aesthetics.

She can be found on Twitter @oddletters and occasionally blogging at oddletters.com.

Steven Schirra worked most recently as coordinator and researcher at Emerson College’s Engagement Game Lab, collaborating with communities to design and deploy local game initiatives. With a background in composition/rhetoric, his work focuses largely on the ways in which communities (geographical and virtual) use digital media and games to deliberate, learn, and research. His research interests include game studies, civic engagement, new media literacies, fan studies, composition studies, digital archives, digital writing, and the history of the book.

He holds a B.A. in English from Kent State University and an M.A. in Publishing & Writing from Emerson College.

Sonny Sidhu comes to MIT from the city of Philadelphia, where he has lived since graduating from Swarthmore College with a special major in film and media studies in 2009.

Sonny’s interests and research are centered around the art and practice of narrative storytelling in interactive or computational media. At MIT, Sonny hopes to map the contours of phenomena such as disruptive processes of subjective identification, projection, and transferral among ‘spectators’ of interactive narratives; the computational organization and data-structural qualities of narrative, rhetorical, and logical constructions drawn from literature and the humanities; and the aesthetics of choice in highly variable interactive media environments and games.

A native of Chestertown, Maryland, Sonny also enjoys following pro sports, playing and recording music, making art, eating good food, drinking good beer, and having a good laugh every now and then.

A one-time high school English and History teacher, his sound design, music and mix work can be heard on a variety of educational videos, long and short form documentary films, various promotional shorts, and on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim animated series Assy McGee. Abe is primarily interested in understanding the interrelationship of sports, sports games and rituals.

Jia Zhang is a native of Beijing and has lived in the United States off and on since 1993. Between schools, Jia has worked as a photographer, playground designer, data visualization fellow for the International Budget Project, researcher at NYU’s Environmental Health Clinic, and design director for the artist Xu Bing’s studio. Her research interests are quantitative and qualitative visualizations of systems and the history of information visualization in the sciences.

A West Coast girl at heart, Denise Cheng arrived at MIT from all over. Her background is a mix of journalism, media empowerment and community building, including as a Peace Corps volunteer and the citizen journalism coordinator for The Rapidian, a hyperlocal based in Grand Rapids, Mich. Her college thesis examined the rise of participatory media and its implications for journalism and also explored civic media off the Web, from low power FM to digital storytelling and the Indy Media movement.

Denise is drawn to neighborhoods, design and coding, languages, civic empowerment, DIY and handmade media. You can find out more about her and keep up with her at her blog.

Rodrigo Davies was born in Brazil and raised in the U.K., where he graduated from Oxford University with a B.A. in History and Politics in 2003. A former journalist at Bloomberg and the BBC in London, before joining CMS he was based in Mumbai, where he launched GQ India's web and mobile editions. In his spare time he has worked with the crisis mapping initiative Standby Task Force and consulted for Gateway House, an Indian foreign policy think tank.

He is interested in how media and ICT can be used to build stronger communities and improve governance by bringing citizens closer to policy making. Rodrigo will work closely with the Center for Civic Media to develop tools that empower citizens, activists and policymakers.

When he's not writing and developing, Rodrigo is usually found collecting music and DJing.

Alexandre Gonçalves is a reporter at the Brazilian daily newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, where he covers biotechnology and science policy. Before becoming a journalist, he worked as an information architect at many software companies.

For the past three years he has been teaching “Fundamentals of Journalism” at the Course on Applied Journalism, perhaps the most classic course sponsored by a media group in Brazil, where he has gained first-hand experience preparing young journalists to face the growing Big Data challenge.

He is interested in issues such as democracy in the digital era, social implications of new media, and communication activism to promote social reform. These interests are fueled by his experience in the media and his knowledge of information technology – especially databases.

Jason Lipshin is a media scholar and practioner interested in the relationship between the materiality of computers and politics. Working at the intersections of media archeology, software studies, science and technology studies, and the digital humanities, he repeatedly attempts to bridge technical questions with critical and cultural theory, creating scholarship that operates across multiple disciplines and which experiments with multiple media forms.

As a research assistant at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy, Jason has participated in a number of digital humanities initiatives related to multimodal or computationally-intensive scholarship. Some of these include: the NEH-funded Vectors Institute (with Tara McPherson), the Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HACCS) lab, and MovieTagger, an innovative data visualization platform for film scholars conceived by Steve Anderson and Michael Naimark.

Jason received his BA in Critical Studies from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 2011, writing his honors thesis on computer viruses, risk, and control.

Eduardo Marisca graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy from the Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) in Lima. After being trained rather clasically as an academic philosopher, he has done research and teaching on subjects related to the philosophy of technology and media, and the social impact of new technologies.

For the past few years he worked at Ashoka, an international organization sourcing and supporting social innovators around the world - most recently working on online product concepts aimed at innovators in emerging markets, as part of the technology team for Ashoka's Changemakers online platform. He started and leads the Lima Videogame Laboratory, a research initiative on videogames and gaming culture in the Peruvian and Latin American context. For the last couple years, he was living and working in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Current research interests include emerging business models in the knowledge economy, especially as related to developing countries; hacker culture, ethics and economies; and how learning works in virtual worlds and its implications for building citizenship; amongst others. He blogs regularly (in Spanish) at mutaciones.pe, and can be found on Twitter as @piscosour.

Chris Peterson joins CMS on leave from MIT's Office of Undergraduate Admissions, where he spent three years directing digital strategy and communications. In addition to overseeing all web and new media activities for MITAdmissions, Chris liaised with FIRST Robotics and had a special focus on subaltern, disadvantaged, and first-generation applicants.

Before MIT Chris worked as a research assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and as a Senior Campus Rep for Apple. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition Against Censorship, as a Fellow at the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution, and as the sole proprietor of BurgerMap.org. He holds a B.A. in Critical Legal Studies from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he completed his senior thesis on Facebook privacy under Professors Ethan Katsh and Alan Gaitenby. He is interested generally in how people communicate within digitally mediated spaces and occasionally blogs at cpeterson.org.

Lingyuxiu Zhong holds a B.A. in History at Yale University. Her area of specialization is cultural history of the First World War in Britain. Her thesis examines how the mystique of aviation as a heroic and masculine act was deconstructed in the gruesome battles in the air. Having seen how memories of the past can change a society’s collective identity, she hopes to see how media can facilitate the public’s engagement in historiography and in turn promote civic actions.

She also works as a student guide and curator at the Yale Center for British Art. As part of the Representing Reformation team, an interdisciplinary study of the 16th century English sepulchral monuments, she studied how major museums both in the U.S. and in the U.K. utilized media to restore archeological objects to their original contexts.