Faculty

William Uricchio is Professor and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He has held visiting professorships at Stockholm University, the Freie Universität Berlin, and Philips Universität Marburg; and Guggenheim, Fulbright and Humboldt fellowships have supported his research.

Uricchio considers the interplay of media technologies and cultural practices, and their role in (re-) constructing representation, knowledge and publics. In part, he researches and develops new histories of 'old' media (early photography, telephony, film, broadcasting, and new media) when they were new. And in part, he investigates the interactions of media cultures and their audiences through research into such areas as peer-to-peer communities and cultural citizenship, media and cultural identity, and historical representation in computer games and reenactments.

Uricchio's most recent books include Media Cultures (2006 Heidelberg), on responses to media in post 9/11 Germany and the US, and We Europeans? Media, New Collectivities and Europe (2009, Chicago). He is currently completing a manuscript on the concept of the televisual from the 17th century to the present.

Courses: Media in Transition (Fall)

Personal website: William Uricchio

Condry's current research project is The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story. He is interested in the making of global anime cultures, focusing on the creators in Tokyo studios, but also considering wider connections to Asia and the US. What drives the creativity of anime? How does online sharing (or piracy) of anime affect its transnational flows? How are love and sexuality portrayed in the current "moe" boom? Why are there so many giant robots? Anime offers a case study in global media and the transnational dynamics of Japanese culture. He gratefully acknowledges support from the the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Harvard's Program on US-Japan Relations, and the National Science Foundation.

Since January 2006, Condry has been organizing the research project Cool Japan: Media, Culture, Technology at MIT and Harvard. The project involves colloquia and international conferences to examine the cultural connections, dangerous distortions, and critical potential of popular culture. Sponsored by MIT Japan Program, Harvard's Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, the Harvard Asia Center, MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures, and MIT Comparative Media Studies.

Condry's personal site can be found at http://web.mit.edu/condry/www/.

Courses: 21F.035/21F.037 (Spring), 21F.039 (Spring), 21F.065/21F.593 (Fall), 21F.067J/SP.608J/21F.595 (Fall)

James Buzard's area of specialization is 19th-Century British Literature; he teaches courses in the Romantic and Victorian periods, the history of the British novel, masterpieces of Western literature from Homer to Dante, among other subjects. He is the author of The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to "Culture," 1800-1918 (Oxford University Press, 1993), coeditor of a Victorian Studies special issue on Victorian Ethnographies, and author of numerous essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture. His second book, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels, was published by Princeton University Press in 2005. He is head of the Literature Faculty.

Shigeru Miyagawa is Professor of Linguistics and holds the Chair, Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture. His linguistics publications in syntax, argument structure, and Japanese linguistics include several books/monographs and nearly fifty articles. He was an Associate Editor of Language, 2000–2003. Along with linguistics, he runs a laboratory that creates interactive educational programs. StarFestival, which looks at issues of growing up in multilingual, multicultural societies, was awarded the Best of Show at the 1997 MacWorld Exposition, Distinguished Award at the Multimedia Grandprix 2000, and the Irwin Sizer Award for the Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education. JP NET (http://web.mit.edu/fll/www/projects/JPNet.shtml), which has the entire MIT Japanese program on the web, was one of the first online projects in the world to place an entire academic program on the Internet (1993–1994). Visualizing Cultures (visualizingcultures.mit.edu), in collaboration with the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John W. Dower, has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities as an outstanding humanities educational Web site. It won the 2004 MIT Class of 1960 Innovation in Education Award. For his work in interactive media, the educational technology magazine Converge chose him as one of twenty national "Shapers of the Future." He was on the original team that proposed OpenCourseWare, and has helped to start opencoursewares in Japan and elsewhere. He serves on the MIT OpenCourseWare Advisory Board.

His personal website can be found at http://web.mit.edu/miyagawa/www/index.html.

Books and co-edited volumes include: T.H. Huxley: Man's Place in Nature (Nebraska, 1978), Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives, co-editor (Rutgers, 1984), Evolution and Ethics, co-editor (Princeton, 1989), Textual Dynamics of the Professions (Wisconsin, 1991). Essays in London Review of Books, Victorian Science in Context, One Culture, Writing in Non-Academic Disciplines and Science Serialized.

Janet Sonenberg's Master of Fine Arts is in directing from NYU’s School of the Arts and she has taught at Princeton University and Hampshire College. Her booksThe Actor Speaks and Imaginary Landscapes focus on the acting process. In the latter she describes a new acting technique in which actors avail themselves of direct access to their autonomous imaginations. She developed this technique with the help of MIT students. Professor Sonenberg teaches classes in acting and directing, and directs student productions. She most recently directed the Dramashop production of The Internationalist.

Vivek Bald is a documentary filmmaker and scholar whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. His current work, which examines the desertion and settlement of Indian Muslim merchant sailors in U.S. port cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is the basis for a forthcoming book, Bengali Harlem and the Hidden Histories of South Asian New York, and a documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem.

Courses: 21W.786/CMS.336/CMS.836 "The Social Documentary"; 21W.787/CMS.837 "Film, Music, and Social Change"; 21W.785 "Communicating with Web-Based Media"

Featured in the Fall 2009 issue of In Medias Res: "Dub, Diaspora and Digital"

Christopher Capozzola specializes in the political and cultural history of the United States from 1861 to 1945. He graduated from Harvard College and competed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2002. He has held fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Carnegie Scholars Program, and the Social Science Research Council. At MIT, he teaches courses in political and legal history, cultural history, and the history of race, gender, and class.

Professor Capozzola's research interests are in the history of war and politics in everyday life. His first book Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen will be published by Oxford University Press in Spring 2008. The book examines the relationship between citizens, voluntary associations, and the federal government during World War I, through explorations of military conscription and conscientious objection, homefront voluntarism, regulation of enemy aliens, and the emergence of civil liberties movements. An article based on his research won the Louis Pelzer Memorial Award of the Organization of American Historians and the Biennial Article Prize of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

A new project brings together his interests in citizenship, the military, and migration. Following the Flag: Soldiers, Citizens, and the Philippines is a transnational history of American soldiers in the Philippines and Filipino soldiers in the U.S. Military from 1898 to the war in Iraq. Based on government records, court cases, and oral histories, Following the Flag combines social and political history to explore the history of migration, military institutions, and U.S. foreign relations. An essay, "Minutemen for the World: Empire, Citizenship, and the National Guard, 1903-1924," will appear in Colonial Crucible: Transformations in the U.S. Imperial State (University of Wisconsin Press), next year.

He has published articles and essays in American Quarterly, Georgetown Law Journal, Journal of American History, Journal of Women's History, New England Quarterly, and Rethinking History, as well as in popular periodicals including The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, New Labor Forum, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Washington Post Book World.

Beth Coleman is Assistant Professor of Writing and New Media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies. Her fields of research interest include new media, contemporary aesthetics, electronic music, critical theory and literature, and race theory. She is a faculty member of the MIT C3 game culture and mobile media initiative. Her writing has been published in a variety of catalogues, presses, and journals. Coleman is a 2003-4 Rockefeller New Media Fellow, a 2004 Ford Foundation fellow, and a 2006 AAUW Emerging Scholar fellow. Under the name M. Singe, she co-founded the SoundLab Cultural Alchemy project, established in 1995. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally at P.S.1 Museum of Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Parkett, Mirror's Edge exhibition, ARC/Musee d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, List Gallery, among other venues.

Coleman received her BA from Yale University and her Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Difference Engines: Race as Technology. Her global media research initiative Project Good Luck was launched in China the summer of 2006.

Coelman's personal site can be found at http://cms.mit.edu/people/bcoleman.

Courses: CMS.100(Fall)

Mia Consalvo is Visiting Associate Professor in the Comparative Media Studies program for 2009-2010. She is also Associate Professor at Ohio University in the School of Media Arts and Studies. She is currently serving as the Vice President of the Association of Internet researchers, to become President of the organization this October, and she is on the steering committee of Women in Games International. Her current research examines several topics, including the role of Japan in the formation of the videogame industry, the cultural of casual games, and women's gameplay. Her work has been published in Cinema Journal, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Games and Culture, among others. She is also the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames from MIT Press, and is co-editor of the forthcoming Blackwell Handbook of Internet Studies.

Featured in the Fall 2009 issue of In Medias Res: "An Interview with Mia Consalvo".

Crocker is author and co-author for two college-level textbooks for German published in multiple editions by Boston-based firms: as co-author for the audio program and ancillaries for the introductory first-year textbook, Neue Horizonte, Dollenmayer and Hansen, D.C. Heath, fourth edition 1996; as author for the intermediate-level workbook for communicative strategies Reden-Mitreden-Dazwischenreden, Heinle and Heinle, second edition, 1990, co-authored in the first edition with Claire Kramsch.

She reviews numerous manuscripts and assists in the development process of German textbooks for several publishers, including Heinle and Heinle, Holt Rinehart Winston, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, and Yale University Press. In the area of materials development, her most recent research projects investigate the pedagogical design and the implementation of hypermedia for new learning environments. Her first experimental project in progress, In der Niederlausitz, is a multimedia CD-ROM designed with interactive functionality. Crocker is co-directing with MIT colleague Dr. Kurt Fendt Berliner sehen, a hypermedia documentary that is being developed in conjunction with the emerging numerous possibilities for collaboration on the World Wide Web.

Research Grants and Awards include: Provost's Fund 1996, National Endowment for the Arts 1994-96, Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation Fellowship 1995, The Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning 1991-1995, Dean's Fund 1990.

Courses: 21M.775 (Fall), 21M.846/21M.847 (Spring)

Professor Donaldson was the Head of the Literature Section from 1990 until 2005, as Ann Fetter Friedlaender Professor of Humanities from 1993 until 1998, and as Class of 1960 Fellow for Excellence in Teaching from 2001 until 2003.

His page at the LIT@MIT website, including publications, can be found at http://lit.mit.edu/people/pdonaldson.php.

Courses: 21L.706/CMS.830 (Spring)

Her page at the LIT@MIT website, including publications, can be found at http://lit.mit.edu/people/mfuller.php.

Gilberte Furstenberg was born and educated in France where she received her Agregation. She taught English at the University of Paris-Nanterre, then moved to the United States where she became a correspondent for the French news magazine L'Express. Her next career move brought her to MIT where she has been teaching French for the last twenty years. In her courses, from the very beginning to the advanced levels, she makes use of authentic print, video and multimedia materials in order to integrate culture into the language curriculum. She also favors a cross-cultural approach to the study of materials, as a way of accessing the different underlying values in French and American cultures.

Her research interests lie in the development of interactive multimedia programs for learning French and developing an understanding of its culture. She is the principal author of A la Rencontre de Philippe, a pioneering interactive fiction, Dans un quartier de Paris, an interactive multimedia documentary. Both have won national and international awards and are published by Yale University Press. She is currently involved in the development of a Web-based cross-cultural project, entitled Cultura, which provides a unique comparative approach for understanding another culture.

She has given numerous presentations, lectures and workshops in the U.S. and abroad focusing on the many uses of multimedia in the foreign language curriculum, and the subsequent new emerging role of the foreign language teacher. She is the author of pedagogical guides, articles, and chapters in books.

Courses: 21A.350J/SP.484J/STS.086J (Spring), 21A.360J/CMS.710J/STS.065J (Spring)

Her page at the LIT@MIT website, including publications, can be found at http://web.mit.edu/lit/www/faculty/henderson.html.

Courses: 21L.486 (Spring)

Her page at the LIT@MIT website, including publications, can be found at http://lit.mit.edu/people/wkelley.php.

Courses: 21L.421 (Spring)

His page at the LIT@MIT website, including publications, can be found at http://lit.mit.edu/people/akibel.php.

Courses: 21L.435 (Spring)

Courses: 11.127J/CMS.590J/11.252J/CMS.863J (Spring)

Courses: 21L.011 (Spring), 21M.283 (Fall), 21M.284/CMS.925 (Spring)

Nick Montfort's digital media projects include the blog Grand Text Auto, where he and five others write about computer narrative, poetry, games, and art; Ream, a 500-page poem written on one day; Mystery House Taken Over, a collaborative "occupation" of a classic game; Implementation, a novel on stickers written with Scott Rettberg; The Ed Report, a serialized novel written with William Gillespie; and the interactive fiction pieces Book and Volume, Ad Verbum, and Winchester's Nightmare.

Montfort edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (with N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland, and Scott Rettberg, ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, The MIT Press, 2003). He wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (The MIT Press, 2003), and, with William Gillespie, 2002: A Palindrome Story (Spineless Books, 2002), which was acknowledged by the Oulipo as the world's longest literary palindrome. He is now investigating narrative variation in interactive fiction, the human meanings and machine functions of code, and the role of platforms in creative computing. Montfort and Ian Bogost are now writing Video Computer System: The Atari 2600 Platform.

Montfort's Ph.D. is in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania. He earned masters degrees at MIT (at the Media Lab) and Boston University (in creative writing — poetry). His personal site can be found at http://www.nickm.com.

Courses: CMS.950 (Fall), CMS.951 (Spring)

Jeffrey S. Ravel studies the history of French and European political culture from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Ravel is the author of The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791 (Cornell University Press, 1999). His new book, The Would-Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder and Justice in Seventeenth-Century France, will be published in July 2008 by Houghton Mifflin.

Ravel was Editor for volumes 35 and 36 of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, an annual publication of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He is a Co-Founder of CÉSAR, a website devoted to the study of seventeenth and eighteenth-century French theater, and he is a principal investigator for the Comédie-Française Registers Project, a new initiative of MIT's Hyperstudio. Teaching interests include Old Regime and Revolutionary France, European cultural and intellectual history, the history of the book and comparative media studies, and Latin America.

Courses: CMS.801 (Fall)

Director Jay Scheib recently premiered his adaptation of Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness with Pont Mühely in Budapest at the TRAFO House of Contemporary Arts. Other recent works include The Medea after Heiner Müller and Euripides at La Mama in New York City with subsequent performances in Istanbul and Adana Turkey, and a multimedia adaptation titled In this is the End of Sleeping after Chekhov’s Patonov fragment for the Chekhov Now Festival in NYC. Other credits include: New York Premier of Kevin Oakes’ The Vomit Talk of Ghosts at the Flea Theater; The Demolition Downtown by Tennessee Williams at MIT (pictured at left); Musset’s Lorenzaccio at the Loeb Drama Center; Koltès’ West Pier at the Ohio Theatre; Falling and Waving, at Arts at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn. Projects in Berlin include MARGARETHHAMLET at Schwedterstr 12; an adaptation of Aeschylus’ trilogy ORESTIA AMERICA AMERICA, dreamlife of thousandaire affluence commissioned by the Exiles Festival, Berliner Staatsbank; two new plays by Lothar Trolle, Fernsehen and Vormittag in der Freiheit on the 3.Stock Volksbuehne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin, co-production BAT. Other international credits: Glass/Moan and THIS PLACE IS A DESERT, both in Budapest; The War Plays by Edward Bond, and In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltès, at the Mozarteum, Salzburg Austria. Winner of the Richard Sherwood Award, The Wade Award and numerous fellowships, Scheib is a regular guest professor at the Mozarteum Institute für Schauspiel und Regie, in Salzburg, Austria. He holds an MFA from Columbia University.

Jay Scheib is the Theater Arts major departure advisor advisor.

His personal site can be found at http://www.jayscheib.com.

Courses: 21M.840/21M.841(Spring)

Hanna Rose Shell, a historian and media artist is as Assistant Professor in the Program on Science, Technology and Society. Her recent films include Locomotion in Water (2005), about the history of chronophotographic practice in science, and Secondhand (Pepe) (2007), co-directed with CMS-alum Vanessa Bertozzi, an exploration of textile recycling, diaspora cultures and cross-cultural history which recently screened all over Haiti, and at MOMA. Shell’s multimedia installations, based on her camouflage work, have been exhibited in Boston and Los Angeles. Her latest film BLIND is in final post-production. Shell received an M.A. in American Studies from Yale University in 2002, and a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard in 2007. For her Ph.D., she focused on the history of camouflage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the intersection of the histories of biology, military strategy, technology and film media practice. She was elected as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows in 2007, where she was in residence in 2008-2009, and will return in 2010-2011. Shell’s book Hide and Seek: Camouflage and the Media of Reconnaissance, will appear from Zone Books in Spring 2010. Shell edited a reprint of W.T. Hornaday’s Extermination of the American Bison (Smithsonian Press, 2002 [1889]), and has published widely on natural history preservation and display practices, the history of ecology, experimental film history, and renaissance history of geology and art.

Shell's MIT homepage

Courses: 24.209 (Fall), 24.213/CMS.820 (Spring), 24.263/CMS.810 (Spring), 24.265 (Fall)

David Thorburn is Professor of Literature at MIT and Director of the MIT Communications Forum. His most recent books (co-edited with Henry Jenkins) are Democracy and New Media and Rethinking Media Change, the launch volumes in the MIT Press series "Media in Transition" of which he is editor in chief. Other writings include Conrad's Romanticism and many essays and reviews on literature and media in such publications as Partisan Review, Commentary, The New York Times and The American Prospect as well as scholarly journals. He has published poetry in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Threepenny Review and Slate. His essays on television, written in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and his course, "American Television: A Cultural History," were among the first in the country to examine the medium in a humanistic context. He has also edited collections of essays on romanticism and on John Updike as well as a widely used anthology of fiction, Initiation.

Prof. Thorburn was the founder and for twelve years the Director of the MIT Film and Media Studies Program, the ancestor of the Comparative Media Studies Program, MIT's first graduate program in the Humanities. Founded 25 years ago, the MIT Communications Forum sponsors lectures, panel discussions and occasional conferences devoted to the political and cultural impact of communications, with special emphasis on emerging technologies. Prof. Thorburn has been the Forum's director since 1996.

In 2002, Prof. Thorburn was named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, MIT's highest teaching award. He received his A.B. degree from Princeton, his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford and taught in the English Department at Yale for ten years before joining the MIT faculty in 1976.

His personal site can be found at http://mit.edu/thorburn/www/home.html. His page on the LIT@MIT site, including publications, can be found at http://lit.mit.edu/people/dthorburn.php.

Courses: 21L.011 (Fall), 21L.432 (Spring), CMS.796 (Fall)

Courses: 21F.052(Spring)

Courses: 21A.336 (Spring), 21A.337/CMS.917 (Spring)

Professor Jing Wang received her Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  She taught at Duke University for sixteen years before joining the MIT FL&L faculty. She is the Head of Foreign Languages and Literatures, the founder and organizer of the MIT International Committee of Critical Policy Studies of China and a participating member of the MIT Laboratory for Branding Cultures. Professor Wang also serves as the Chair of the International Advisory Board of Creative Commons in China and is currently working with Dr. Kurt Fendt to develop several international projects under the auspices of FL&L’s digital media lab Hyperstudio. While directing a digital animation project in collaboration with the Beijing Film Academy and MIT Comparative Media Studies, she is helping MIT building the infrastructure for Digital Humanities.

Professor Wang published several books and articles, among them, the award-winning The Story of Stone, High Culture Fever, and the editor of Locating China: Space, Place, and Popular Culture, Popular Culture and the Chinese State, China’s Avant-Garde Fiction, Cinema and Desire (with Tani Barlow).  Her current research interests include branding and marketing, advertising, popular culture, and media and cultural policies, digital media and educational technology, with an area focus on the People’s Republic of China.  Her new book Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2007.