by 
The Comparative Media Studies program is pleased to introduce another class of extraordinary young scholars.
Jason Begy graduated from Canisius College in Buffalo where he earned a BA in English (2004) and spent much of his time working for Canisius’ Department of Information Technology Services. Begy’s undergraduate thesis argued that the rules and mechanics of chess and go were a reflection of the religious traditions of Catholicism and Buddhism, respectively. In 2008, Begy completed an MS in Technical Communication at Northeastern University in Boston, where his coursework focused on information design for the Web and information architecture for internal corporate and university networks. When it comes to game studies, Begy would describe himself as a ludologist and as such believes that the best way to study games is through their rules and mechanics. He looks forward to continuing his work in games by focusing on abstraction and emergent game play.
Audubon Dougherty studied writing at Emerson College before transferring to Smith College to complete a degree in anthropology with a focus on visual culture (2002). This led her to the field of human rights, where she traveled to Southeast Asia in 2006 as a blogger and photographer to assess disaster relief projects assisting tsunami survivors. In 2007, she returned to Thailand to provide new media training for an organization serving Burmese migrants and undocumented workers. As a communications specialist for a labor union, she helped develop a new media program which utilized e-communication, streaming video and mobile messaging to organize 22,000 home care workers in Massachusetts. These professional experiences inspired her to pursue graduate study at CMS, where she plans to research the ways grassroots organizations can use accessible media tools to expand their online outreach, harness advocacy capabilities and communicate more effectively with their constituencies. Outside of work, Dougherty formed her own video production collective, producing and directing films for exhibition at festivals and on the web. Her website is at tapioca.tv.
Madeleine Elish pursued extensive research in contemporary art practices, anthropology of technology and critical theory as an undergraduate at Columbia University (BA 2006). Beyond her coursework, she directed and acted in theater productions, curated art shows and taught in an after-school arts program. An internship during college turned into a job at the Whitney Museum of American Art where she wrote essays and curriculum guides based on the museum’s art collection and published on the Whitney’s website for students and teachers. Since graduating, Elish has also worked for the contemporary art gallery Gavin Brown’s enterprise, NPR’s On the Media, and most recently, worked as an editor for various websites published by Rodale. At CMS, her research revolves around the intersection of vision, perception, aesthetics and ethics, centering around the ways that new media alter the way we see the world.
Florence Gallez was a Moscow-based journalist for eight years, most recently as a freelance producer for CNN’s Moscow Bureau. She has covered Russian politics, economy and culture for a variety of print, broadcast and electronic media organizations, including The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Moscow Times, and the U.S. publisher Bureau of National Affairs. She has also reported for the BBC World Service in Budapest and for the Russian daily Segodnya in London. These experiences have left her with a strong interest in understanding and circumventing various forms of government censorship of the news. At MIT she plans to develop a secure online space for media professionals and their audience to collaborate on news stories reporting and writing, which could be replicated in a variety of offline spaces in order to optimize flexibility and interference-free access. She holds a BA in English and Russian from the University of London and a MSc in journalism from Boston University, with additional course work completed at Harvard University. A lifelong Prince fan with an interest in copyright and cyber rights, she has covered Russia’s IP issues and legislation for BNA’s Patent, Trademark & Copyright Journal, and in her spare time she dreams of creating the “ultimate Prince music distribution system.”
Madeline Flourish Klink co-founded one of the largest Harry Potter fan fiction sites, FictionAlley.org, a project which was nominated for a Webby in 2004 and a Prix Ars Electronica award in 2005. She was one of the young fan fiction writers interviewed for Convergence Culture, already identified as a key writer and editor while still in high school. Her undergraduate career focused on the classics and religion, interests that she learned to combine with her growing fascination with digital media and fan culture. She earned a BA in religion from Reed College in 2008, where her undergraduate thesis explored the question: Can one have a Catholic religious experience in virtual reality? The project ultimately centered on religious communities within Second Life. At MIT, Klink looks forward to returning to her long-standing interests in education and fan culture. Her personal website is at madelineklink.com.
Hillary Kolos completed a BFA at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU and worked in after-school programs, including one at the School of the Future, where she co-taught a high school filmmaking class. After graduating from college in 2002, she worked at a not-for-profit production company that produces documentaries on current issues in education for PBS. Seeking more experience in the classroom, she then worked as a media educator in New York City schools. She currently works as a media mentor for Adobe, advising teachers on how to incorporate media into their curricula. She was inspired to return to graduate school after reading the white paper produced by Project NML for the MacArthur Foundation. She has expressed a desire to do thesis work focused on efforts by Katie Salen to develop a game-design based high school in New York. In the future, she hopes to work as a consultant to help teachers incorporate new media literacy skills into their classrooms.
Michelle Moon Lee holds a BA in computer science and architectural studies from Brown University (2005). Her projects include “Brackets: Imagined and Real Architecture in the Han, Tang, and Liao Dynasties” with accompanying 3-D models which examines traditional Chinese architectural elements over time, a website focused on the history of pirates and junks in the South China Sea, an architectural history game for 4th-grade girls, and a research tool and serious game produced by Georgia Tech’s Tennenbaum Institute. Her extracurricular interests include theatre, feminist and queer activism, and publishing. Recently, she worked on an augmented reality performance of “Woyzeck” and remediated the piece as an interactive Flash game. Lee is currently a prospective member of Quilted, a web design and development cooperative that works with social change and nonprofit organizations. Her research focus at CMS is educational and social awareness-related gaming, specifically the ways in which games can be used to explore and support social initiatives, issues, and problems.
Elliot Pinkus earned an undergraduate degree in information science at Cornell (BA 2008) which allowed him to focus on game design and development courses. He was a member of Cornell’s first Experimental Game Play Project. He has created and implemented a game-design curriculum for Ithaca Middle School and High School students. For the past two summers, Pinkus has worked as a game designer contributing to the work of The Education Arcade – with a primary focus on designing puzzles for the game Labyrinth. He also consulted with one of the GAMBIT teams whose work was enmeshed with The Education Arcade. Beyond games, he has a strong interest in creative writing and narrative writing, including a growing fascination with how the visual storytelling strategies of comics and television create emotional engagement. His writing includes a discussion of Lawrence Lessig’s views on how copyright laws impact cultural production.
Nick Seaver graduated with a BA in interdisciplinary literature from Yale (2007). As an undergraduate, his interest in sonic media led him to research the relationship between the technology of sound reproduction and social conceptions of “noise,” drawing on sources such as David Bowie, Dada sound poems, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and Brian Eno. His academic work is supplemented by experiments in computer-aided composition (using sampling and remixing methods inspired by Eno and minimalist composers such as Steve Reich) and dance music DJing (including a party based on Antonioni’s Blow-Up). In addition to his work in sonic media, Nick has a longstanding interest in the history of the book, which led him to spend a year training full-time as a hand bookbinder. What draws Seaver to the CMS program is a structuralist fascination with the mechanisms of media transmission and the politics and poetics of sampling. His research interests include memetics, data sonification, copies, originals, and noisy failures. His website can be found at http:// nickseaver.net.
Sheila Murphy Seles studied television and popular culture at Middlebury College (BA 2005), completing a senior thesis project centered on Absolutely Fabulous. She did an internship with the writers of The Shield in Los Angeles, getting a first-hand glimpse of how television gets produced. “I had the chance to see several episodes of The Shield’s fifth season from beginning to end; I sat in on brainstorming in the writer’s room, edits and table reads; I spent a considerable amount of time on set during filming; I watched the editors shape that raw footage into director’s cuts, final cuts, and episode promos; and I got a rudimentary education in post- production, from sound mixing to color timing, during visits to studios around LA,” Seles reports. All of this has given her a strong interest in the creative industries and the intersection between fan cultures and queer activism, including an interest in the ways that The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s participatory culture provided a site of political empowerment in 1970s New York and the contemporary production and digital distribution of queer media content.
