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.

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.

Her personal site can be found at http://www.media.mit.edu/~gid.

Courses: MAS.849 (Fall/Spring)

Tatiani G. Rapatzikou is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Literature and Culture at the School of English of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She received her B.A. from University of Athens, Greece, then her M.A. from Lancaster University and her Ph.D as a grantee of the Greek State Scholarship Foundation (I.K.Y) from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.

She has published a monograph entitled Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson (Editions Rodopi, 2004) as well as articles, essays and encyclopaedia entries in Contemporary American Fiction and Technology (in relation to cyberpunk, digital culture and electronic authorship), and contemporary American poetry. She is also on the advisory board of the peer-reviewed journal Writing Technologies. Her other publications include two edited volumes under the titles of Anglo-American Perceptions of Hellenism (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) and American Poetry in Greece (Hellenic Association for American Studies, 2006), a collaboration for guest co-editing of a series of articles on the topic of the American culture-industry of image-making with the European Journal of American Culture (2005), as well as a collaboration with Penguin Classics for the 2003 edition of Edgar Allan Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. In addition, she co-edited the 2008 special issue of GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism which had the title Revisiting Crisis/Reflecting on Conflict: American Literary Interpretations from World War II to Ground Zero (www.enl.auth.gr/gramma).

She is currently working on a project focusing on contemporary American non-linear narratives, the new media, and electronic authorship.

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.