Visiting Scholars and Postdocs

After getting his bachelor's degree in Radio/TV/Film at Madison in 2001, Todd Harper worked in distance learning and web editing at Indiana State University before moving to his hometown of Syracuse for a masters in Media Studies at Syracuse University, and then to Ohio University for a recently-completed doctorate in Mass Communications. His research combines a focus on digital games with an interest in feminist and queer theory and popular culture.

When he is not doing actual research on games, Todd spends a good deal of time playing them; his favorites tend to be over the top fighting games and RPGs that appeal to his campy sense of aesthetics. Inspired by the fighting game players he spoke to while working on his dissertation, his next goal is to travel to the EVO tournament in 2011, learn to use an arcade stick, and still get thoroughly destroyed in the first round of the tourney.

You can follow him on Twitter or read his highly infrequently updated blog, Stay Classy.

Konstantin Mitgutsch is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. His research focuses on learning processes in computer games, empirical research on players' experience, educational game design, and transformative learning in games. He worked in the fields of learning, media studies, computer games and age rating systems at the University of Vienna for several years. In 2010 he was Max Kade Postdoctoral Fellow at the Education Arcade at CMS. In his recent research project he investigates learning patterns in games and different methodologies of game evaluation.

He studied Media Education and Philosophy of Education at the University of Vienna and the Humboldt University Berlin and earned a MA in Education Science, Sociology, Media Studies and Philosophy (2003) and a Ph.D. in 2009. He is participating as an expert member for the Austrian Federal Office for the Positive Assessment of Computer and Console Games and is on the expert council of the Pan European Game Information (PEGI). Since 2007 he organizes the annual Vienna Games Conference FROG.

Mitgutsch is coauthor of Exploring the Edges of Gaming (2010) and Schauplatz Computerspiele (Setting Computergames) (2009).

His blog is at www.kmitgutsch.com.

Ivan's research focuses on media, cognition and politics and analyzes the way in which society constructs a model of democracy. He has been exploring, most recently, how fiction cognitively impacts behavior and how different genres of television fiction frame and influence real life politics and, in particular, Presidential elections. He uses nontraditional empirical data to analyze the construction of meaning reflected in the social and political practices of the social organization of society. This new and alternative approach can best be described as cognitive socio-pragmatics. One example that often goes unnoticed is how the cognitive operations triggered by a fictional television series results in "symbolic violence" on viewers on a cognitive level. These operations determine meaning for viewers and may influence behavior. Ivan describes the mechanisms of symbolic violence and the role they play with emotions and their link with the political world. He believes his research will contribute to empowering citizens with a more informed and critical awareness of the media in democracies across the world.

Ivan has worked as a consultant and researcher in the Middle East, France and Mexico. He holds a Ph.D. and a Masters Degree in Language Sciences with a specialty in Cognitive Linguistics from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His dissertation is titled "The Construction of Fiction and Reality in Political Image and Discourse: Analysis of the Telenovela El Candidato and the Presidential Mexican Campaign of 2000". He holds an undergraduate degree from the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco in Mexico City. Ivan has worked in diplomacy and also holds an Executive Certificate in Homeland Security Studies from the Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Lauder School of Government, Israel, as well as a certificate in Contemporary Criminal Threats from the University of Paris II Assas, Paris.

Clara Fernández-Vara straddles theory and practice in the field of game studies. She studies and develops games as narrative and performative experiences, and has used her theories on the aesthetics of adventure games as the basis for the development of several digital games: Rosemary (2009), Symon (2010), Stranded in Singapore (2011) and The Last Symphony (2012). Her current research focuses on strategies and innovation in environmental storytelling. Other related areas of interest are issues of adaptation from other media into games, digital games history, and curriculum development for teaching videogame theory and practice.

Clara holds a Ph.D. in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology (2009), where she wrote her dissertation on how adventure games are simulations and encourage specific types of performance. She earned a B.A. in English Studies from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2000) and was awarded a fellowship from La Caixa Foundation to pursue a Masters in Comparative Media Studies from MIT (2004).

Her blog is vagrantcursor.wordpress.com.

Laura Forlano is an Assistant Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Forlano’s research is on the role of information technology in supporting open innovation networks in urban environments with a specific emphasis on the use of mobile, wireless and ubiquitous computing technologies to support collaboration. Her current project “Design Collaborations as Sociotechnical Systems,” which is funded by the National Science Foundation, is an international comparative study that focuses on the role of technology in supporting networks of designers in New York, Barcelona and Brisbane. Forlano received a 2011-2012 Fulbright grant to study social innovation networks in Toronto.

She is co-editor with Marcus Foth, Christine Satchell and Martin Gibbs of From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement, which was published by MIT Press in 2011). Her research and writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals including The Information Society, Journal of Community Informatics, IEEE Pervasive Computing, Design Issues and Science and Public Policy and she has been published chapters for books including editor Mark Shepard’s Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space (MIT Press 2011) and The Architecture League of New York’s Situated Technologies pamphlet series and is a regular contributor to their Urban Omnibus blog. Forlano received her Ph.D. in Communications from Columbia University in 2008. She holds a Master’s in International Affairs from Columbia University, a Diploma in International Relations from The Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelor’s in Asian Studies from Skidmore College. She studied at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan from 1993-4. Forlano speaks Japanese and has studied French, Spanish, Italian and German.

Gretchen E. Henderson is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT who writes across genres and the arts to invigorate her critical and creative practices. Working at the intersection of literature, art history, museum studies, disability studies, and music, her research explores museology as a narrative strategy, aesthetics of deformity, poetics of (dis)embodiment / (in)accessibility / author(ity), and the body of the book. Her books include two novels, Galerie de Difformité (&NOW Books, 2011, winner of the Madeleine Plonsker Prize) and The House Enters the Street (Starcherone Books, 2012, shortlisted for the AWP Award Series in the Novel); a critical volume exploring literary appropriations of music, On Marvellous Things Heard (Green Lantern Press, 2011); and a cartographic poetry chapbook, Wreckage: By Land & By Sea (Dancing Girl Press, 2011). Her creative and critical writings have been published in a range of journals and anthologies, including The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing, also forthcoming in Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory (Tauris). Among other projects while at MIT, Gretchen is working on Ugliness: A Cultural History (for Reaktion Books), while engaging with the Digital Humanities and continuing the collaborative and cross-media deformation of Galerie de Difformité. Gretchen holds degrees from Princeton University (B.A.), Columbia University (M.F.A.), and the University of Missouri (Ph.D.), as well as a Preparatory Certificate in Voice from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Beyond MIT, she is a metaLAB Fellow at Harvard University and an Affiliated Scholar at Kenyon College, where she teaches in the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop.

Mikael Jakobsson conducts research on the border between game design and game culture. With a foundation in interaction design, he investigates how gaming activities fit into social and cultural practices, and how this knowledge can be integrated into the development process. His work has been supported by research grants involving collaboration with several game companies. He has developed and taught courses on game design, game criticism, and interaction design, as well as supervised students at the bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral level. During his stay at MIT, he will serve as Project Manager for the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory.

Kelley Kreitz specializes in media change within nineteenth-century print culture in the United States and Latin America. Her research brings together media archeology, the history of journalism, cultural studies, and U.S. and Latin American literary studies. She is currently working on a book called Electrifying News: Nineteenth-Century Print Culture and Media Change in the Americas. The project reanimates a variety of genres that can be considered experiments with new forms of news: the Latin American crónica modernista, the U.S. realist novel, and the new journalism of New York’s popular daily newspapers. The book also compares these genres to today’s digital experiments with news, such as blogs, hyperlocal news websites, newspaper applications for mobile devices, and activist-oriented information platforms.

Kelley also serves as the director of knowledge for Root Cause, a nonprofit research and consulting firm dedicated to identifying and supporting new, collaborative approaches to social change. There, her work centers on identifying and analyzing new ideas about social problem solving that are being demonstrated by creative leaders within nonprofits, philanthropy, government, and business. Kelley has studied at the Centro de Estudios Martianos in Havana, Cuba, and she was a Graduate Fellow at the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Brown University and a B.A. from Columbia University.

Marcella Szablewicz holds a Ph.D. (2012) in Communication and Rhetoric from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MA in East Asian Studies (2004) from Duke University. Her primary research interests include contemporary Chinese youth culture, digital media culture, and the discursive constructions of so-called "deviant" behaviors occurring therein. She employs a multidisciplinary approach that engages ethnographic methods, situational analysis, and critical cultural theory. Her work has been published in the Chinese Journal of Communication and in the volume Online Society in China (Routledge, 2009).

During her time at MIT as a Mellon postdoctoral fellow, Marcella will be working on a book manuscript entitled From Addicts to Athletes: Youth Mobilities and the Politics of Digital Gaming in Urban China. Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork supported by the Fulbright and National Science Foundations, the book will examine the precarious socio-economic futures of urban Chinese youth through the lens of digital gaming culture, while also considering how dominant discourse about digital leisure practices is shaped by larger cultural debates about patriotism and productivity, class and the crafting of the "ideal citizen".

Jasmijn Van Gorp is a postdoc at the Centre for Television in Transition of Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She obtained a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from Antwerp University (2008), with a dissertation on post-Soviet Russian film policy. After completion of her PhD, she joined Utrecht University’s research unit Media and Diaspora, investigating how Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian migrant women living in the Netherlands are organized and sustained through the use of media and networked activities offline. For this ethnographic project, she asked ten women to capture their daily lives in a series of photographs, resulting in a photo exhibition at the museum ImagineIC in Amsterdam. Since Summer 2010, Jasmijn is working as a postdoc for BRIDGE, a digital humanities project of Utrecht University, Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam and The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. The project’s goal is to develop and test search interfaces for audiovisual archives, specifically aimed at media researchers.

Next to academic research, Jasmijn was involved in several film and television projects, such as the documentary film Trulichka (2005) in Latvia, and the experimental film project Passage (2010) in Ukraine. She is currently working on a new documentary film, based on stories in and around Kuznetsky Most street in Moscow.

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 adviser to both government and industry, he is a technology columnist for Edge Magazine and holds patents in interactive media and broadband communications dealing with seminal telecommunications engineering.