Visiting Scholars and Postdocs

Joshua Green recently completed his PhD in Media Studies from the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. His PhD looked at the construction, scheduling and reception of American teen dramas in Australia. Since completing his PhD he has worked in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT. In 2006 he collaborated with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, Australia, preparing content and developing an accompanying publication for TV50, an exhibition celebrating 50 years of Australian broadcasting. He has published work on Australian television scheduling strategies, youth media use, the history of Australian television and the construction of the cultural public sphere. His current research interests include television branding strategies, the history and future of broadcast television, co-created media production and the knowledge produced by passionate amateurs.

Alice J. Robison (Ph.D. in English, 2006, University of Wisconsin-Madison) conducts ethnographic research on videogame design as a writing process and its implications for pedagogies of rhetoric and literacy. A founding member of the Games and Professional Practice Simulations (GAPPS) and "Room 130" videogames and literacy learning research teams at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Alice has worked since 2002 to pioneer the emerging scholarship in the area of games and literacy learning. In an effort to show how many videogame designers work to create games that inspire progressive literacy activities, Alice has presented and published her work on videogame design in the U.S. and abroad. She is an experienced classroom teacher and the recipient of several campus-wide teaching awards, including the Capstone Ph.D. Teaching Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Doris C. Rusch holds a postdoctoral position with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in the Programme at Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Before that she did postdoctoral work at the Institute for Design and Assessment of Technology at Vienna University of Technology. In her habilitation project titled "Once More with Meaning", Rusch investigates the medium specific characteristics of digital games and their potential to produce a wide range of emotionally satisfying and deeply meaningful experiences. Although her work is theory-driven, she aims at applicability of her research to actual game design with the goal of pushing the boundaries of games as media. Rusch has an eclectic background having completed studies in German Literature, Philosophy, English and Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna, where she also received her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics. Her work in computer game studies is part of a larger interest in "narrative worlds" that expands over books, comics, and films.

Pilar Lacasa is Professor of Developmental Psychology and Education at the University of Alcalá (Spain). During the past ten years she has been collaborating with teachers and families to facilitate the acquisition of new forms of literacy that enable children and adults to develop as global citizens in their community, as producers as well as active receivers of media content.

She leads the “Culture, Technologie and New Literacies Research Group”, which designs new forms of educational activity settings adapted to cultural situations. The Group has developed innovative methodological approaches in a number of areas, and has led the debate about the development of teacher training programs and educational policy in Spain. At this moment they are working on a collaborative project with Electronic Arts (http://www.aprendeyjuegaconea.net/uah/php/index.php) to introduce specific video games to Spanish classrooms so that they can be used as educational tools by teachers and families.

Pilar has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Utah, British Columbia and University of California (Santa Cruz and San Diego). Her most relevant publications have been published in Linguistics & Education, Social Psychology, and Culture & Psychology.

Christopher Weaver received his SM from MIT and was the initial Daltry scholar at Wesleyan University, where he earned dual Masters Degrees in Japanese and Computer Science and a CAS Doctoral Degree in Japanese and Physics. The former Director of Technology Forecasting for ABC and Chief Engineer to the Subcommittee on Communications for the US Congress, he later founded Bethesda Softworks, a leading software entertainment company that is credited with the development of physics-based sports sims and creating the original John Madden Football for Electronic Arts and the well known Elder Scrolls Role Playing series. An advisor to both government and industry, he is a technology columnist for NextGen Magazine and holds patents in interactive media and broadband communications dealing with seminal telecommunications engineering.

A former member of the Architecture Machine Group and Fellow of the MIT Communications and Policy Program under Ithiel de Sola Pool, Weaver was previously a Fellow of the Robotics Simulation Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon and currently teaches part time as a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies Program and is a Communications Technology Roadmap Member and Visiting Scientist in the Microphotonics Center.