Staff

As Systems Administrator for Comparative Media Studies, GAMBIT, and Project nml, Rik Eberhardt's current duties include maintaining the ever growing array of servers, lab computers, websites, and databases generated by our research projects, procuring and distributing equipment, and providing hands-on support for CMS faculty, students, researchers, and staff. A 2002 graduate from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA, he received his Bachelor of Arts with a Literary & Cultural Studies concentration in Postmodern Literature, 'Cyberpunk' Science Fiction, and Contemporary Japanese Literature in Translation. His previous professional experience was as a Desktop and Lab Systems Technician for Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. The ending to Shadow of the Collossus made him cry.

Dr. Kurt Fendt is Research Director in Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Comparative Media Studies Graduate Program (CMS). He is Director of the HyperStudio, a development laboratory for educational media projects in the humanities and co-Principal Investigator and Manager of the d'Arbeloff-funded Metamedia project. He has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Cologne, the Technical University of Aachen (both Germany), and the University of Klagenfurt, Austria; he was also Visiting Scientist at the Fraunhofer Institut in Sankt Augustin, Germany. His work includes the conceptualization and implementation of multimedia applications for the humanities, with a special focus on foreign-language and culture education, interaction design, and research on hypertext and narrative theory. Since 2005, he has been organizing the MIT Short Film Festival.

Fendt teaches several courses in the CMS Graduate Program, in Foreign Languages and Literatures, and the Literature Section. He is co- Director of "Berliner sehen", a collaborative hypermedia learning environment for German Studies, the on-line collaboration space for educators "Berliner sehen Exchange", and co-author of the French interactive narrative A la rencontre de Philippe (CD-ROM version). Before coming to MIT in 1993, Fendt was Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Bern in Switzerland, where he established the Media Learning Center for the Humanities and earned his Ph.D. in modern German literature with a thesis on hypertext and text theory in 1993 after having completed his MA at the University of Munich, Germany.

Generoso Fierro (Gene) is the events coordinator for CMS and the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, and works closely with our visiting scholars and research affiliates. Currently, Generoso is the membership director of the MIT radio station WMBR, where he is the longtime DJ of the program Generoso's Bovine Ska and Rocksteady. The show concentrates on the music of Jamaica prior to reggae (mento, ska and rocksteady) and has been on the air since 1997. A filmmaker and avid film fan, Gene recently finished a documentary on the legendary Jamaican guitarist Nearlin "Lynn" Taitt.

Amanda Ford is the Administrative Assistant to Henry Jenkins. She graduated from Western Kentucky University in 2005 with a Bachelor's degree in Literature and a minor in Film Studies. Since graduation, she has presented at the National Popular Culture Association conference on interdisciplinary studies in higher education and has taken further classes in history. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband and two dogs.

Jesper Juul has worked with video game theory since the field's early days in the late 1990s. Though originally trained in literature, he tries to consider video games in a broader perspective, also spanning psychology, computer science, and player studies. He is currently examining the emergence of casual games: video games that reach outside the traditional video game audience.

Prior to his appointment at GAMBIT, Jesper was an assistant professor at the Centre for Computer Game Research Copenhagen where he also earned his Ph.D. While Jesper works with and thoroughly appreciates pure theory, he is also interested in the intersection of video game theory and development practice. He has worked as a designer and programmer of multiplayer web-based games and, more recently, casual games.

Jesper's book on video game theory Half-Real was published by MIT Press in 2005. His blog on video game theory, The Ludologist, can be found at www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist and a collection of his writings can be found at www.jesperjuul.net/text.

Scot Osterweil leads several Education Arcade projects promoting learning in math, literacy, history, science and foreign language. Formerly the Senior Designer at TERC, a research & development center devoted to math and science education, he designed Zoombinis Island Odyssey, winner of the 2003 Bologna New Media Prize, and the most recent game in the Zoombinis line of products (Riverdeep/TLC). He is the creator of the Zoombinis, and with Chris Hancock he co-designed the multi-award winning Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, and its first sequel, Zoombinis Mountain Rescue. He is the also the designer of the games Switchback and Yoiks!.

Scot's other software designs included work on InspireData (Inspiration Software). He has participated in research on the role of computer games in learning, and on the use of video in data collection and representation. He previously worked in television, on the production of Public Television's Frontline, Evening at Pops, and American Playhouse, and as an animator on a wide range of programs. He is a graduate of Yale College with a degree in Theater Studies.

Douglas Purdy is the Manager of the Humanities Film Office. He is also the teaching assistant for Kung Fu Cinema: Transnational Perspectives. Purdy has been a DJ at WZBC's Beyond the QE2: Future Funk Radio, one of Boston's longest-running dance shows. He has completed a horror novel and is currently plodding through the second. His most recent publication was in the small press anthology, Vivisections.

Brad Seawell coordinates the MIT Communications Forum and helps to promote and organize some CMS public events including the media-in-transition conferences. He is associate editor of the media-in-transition anthologies Rethinking New Media: The Aesthetics of Transition and Democracy and New Media. Prior to working at MIT, he was an editor at Banker & Tradesman, a business weekly based in Boston.

Prior to working for CMS, Undergraduate Administrator Becky Shepardson was an administrative assistant for the Computer Science and AI Lab at MIT. She continues to work part-time as an editorial assistant for the theoretical computer science journal Information and Computation, edited by Albert Meyer. Interesting coincidence:  Albert Meyer was the Chair of the CoC (Committee on Curricula) when the CMS Undergraduate Major was approved on an experimental basis in 2003.  Becky is finishing up a master’s degree in Applied Linguistics at Boston University.

Philip Tan is the executive director for the US operations of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a game research initiative hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is concurrently a project manager for the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore.

He has served as a member of the steering committee of the Singapore chapter of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) and worked closely with Singapore game developers to launch industry-wide initiatives and administer content development grants as an assistant manager in the Animation & Games Industry Development section of MDA. He has produced and designed PC online games at The Education Arcade, a research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that studied and created educational games. He complements a Master's degree in Comparative Media Studies with work in Boston's School of Museum of Fine Arts, the MIT Media Lab, WMBR 88.1FM and the MIT Assassins' Guild, the latter awarding him the title of "Master Assassin" for his live-action roleplaying game designs. He also founded a DJ crew at MIT.

Jessica Tatlock joined Project New Media Literacies in February 2009, having spent the previous year coordinating the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Prior to Harvard, Jessica worked for more than a decade in Boston's youth development and education fields, developing programs, tools and resources for practitioners working in a wide range of settings. As NML Project Associate, Jessica manages the details behind the scenes at NML. She has an M.Ed in Cultural Diversity and Curriculum Reform from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and lives in Brookline with her two school-aged children.

Anna van Someren is creative manager for the MacArthur Foundation's New Media Literacies (NML) project. Prior to working at MIT, Anna was Youth Voice Collaborative Program Coordinator at the YWCA Boston, where she developed new media curriculum and taught multimedia production workshops. She has taught Digital Editing and Video Storytelling at the college level and is also an accomplished commerical editor and award-wining video artist. Anna is a graduate of Colgate University and has her Master of Fine Arts degree from Massachusetts College of Art.

A native of Washington, DC, Andrew holds a B.A. in Communication from Wake Forest University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College. He worked previously in higher education publishing at Houghton Mifflin and at the Feinstein International Center, a humanitarianism research center at Tufts University.

In his all-too spare time, he is the fiction editor for Identity Theory and maintains his blog at fungibleconvictions.com.

As the program manager for CMS, Sarah Wolozin manages the financial, research, and personnel administration as well as development and outreach for the program. Before arriving at CMS, she produced documentaries and websites for PBS and cable for over ten years on topics ranging from African-American arts to the American healthcare system.