Faculty
[View their full bios at cmsw.mit.edu/faculty.]
Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Contact
Vivek Bald
Vivek is a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. He is currently working on a transmedia project aimed at recovering the histories of peddlers and steamship workers from British colonial India who came to the United States under the shadows of anti-Asian immigration laws and settled within U.S. communities of color in the early 20th century.
Courses taught
CMS.836 Social Justice and The Documentary Film
Research group affiliations
Professor
Ian Condry
Ian is a cultural anthropologist of Japan and professor at MIT. He is the author of two books, Hip-Hop Japan and The Soul of Anime, both of which explore globalization from below. He launched the MIT Spatial Sound Lab, a community production studio for immersive, multiperspective, sonic experimentation. Among the goals is to provide a space for using sound to disrupt hierarchies, reduce inequalities, and cross borders.
Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Latin American Studies
Paloma Duong
Paloma researches and teaches modern and contemporary Latin American culture. She works with social texts and emergent media cultures that speak to the exercise of cultural agencies and the formation of political subjectivity. She is currently writing Portable Postsocialisms: Cuban Mediascapes after the End of History, a book-length study of Cuba’s changing mediascape and an inquiry on the postsocialist condition and its contexts.
Visiting Professor
Eric Gordon
Eric is a professor of civic media and the director of the Engagement Lab at Emerson College in Boston. His research focuses on the transformation of public life and governance in digital culture, specifically looking at the context of equitable and generative “smart cities.” For the last ten years, Professor Gordon has explored the role of play and creativity in civic life, looking at how game systems and playful processes can augment traditional modes of civic participation.
Courses taught
Professor of Digital Media and A.I.
D. Fox Harrell
Fox’s research focuses on the relationship between imaginative cognition and computation. He founded and directs the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab) to develop new forms of computational narrative, gaming, social media, and related digital media based in computer science, cognitive science, and digital media arts. He is the author of the book Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression.
Courses taught
CMS.814 Phantasmal Media: Computer-Based Art Theory and Practice
CMS.827 Imagination, Computation, and Expression Studio
CMS.828 Advanced Identity Representation
Research group affiliations
- Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab
- Center for Advanced Virtuality (MIT Open Learning)
Professor
Director of Graduate Studies
Heather Hendershot
Heather Hendershot studies TV news, conservative media, political movements, and American film and television history. She has held fellowships at Vassar College, New York University, Princeton, Harvard, Radcliffe, and Stanford, and she has also been a Guggenheim fellow. Her courses emphasize the interplay between creative, political, and regulatory concerns and how those concerns affect what we see on the screen (big or little).
Courses taught
Professor
Head of Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Eric Klopfer
Eric is Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade. His work uses a Design Based Research methodology to span the educational technology ecosystem. Much of his research has focused on computer games and simulations in AR, VR, and mobile for building understanding of science, technology, engineering. and mathematics.
Courses taught
CMS.863J Design and Development of Games for Learning
Research group affiliations
Professor of Digital Media
Nick Montfort
Nick develops computational poetry and art and has participated in dozens of literary and academic collaborations. Recent publications include Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities, along with several computer-generated poetry books: Golem, Hard West Turn, The Truelist, #!, the collaboration 2×6, and Autopia. He has worked to contribute to platform studies, critical code studies, and electronic literature.
Courses taught
CMS.844 Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities
Research group affiliations
Robert M. Metcalfe Professor of Writing and Comparative Media Studies
Jim Paradis
Jim works on problems of the mutually-influential rise of professionalism and vernacular culture, the public reception of science, and the way in which fields of expertise are represented in popular media. His methods are comparative, and draw on cultural studies, biographical approaches, intellectual history, and the history of rhetoric to study science popularization, science fiction, science education, two-cultures controversies, science as entertainment, and vernacular science.
Courses taught
CMS.808 The Visual Story: Graphic Novel, Type to Tablet
CMS.875 Reading Climate Through Media
CMS.876 History of Media and Technology
Research group affiliations
Associate Professor
Justin Reich
Justin Reich is an educational researcher interested in the future of learning in a networked world. He is the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab which aspires to design, implement and research the future of teacher learning. He is the author of Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education from Harvard University Press. He is the host of the TeachLab podcast, and five open online courses on EdX including Sorting Truth from Fiction: Civic Online Reasoning and Becoming a More Equitable Educator: Mindsets and Practices.
Courses taught
CMS.894 Education Technology Studio
CMS.895 Learning, Media, and Technology
Research group affiliations
Associate Professor of Media Studies and Japan Studies
Paul Roquet
Paul theorizes the cultural politics and power relations woven through mediated spatial perception, focusing on the use of media to shape the emotional environments of everyday life. His first book, Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self, explores the use of music, video, film, and literature as forms of background mood regulation — what it means to treat peripheral perception as a resource for self-care. His current work extends these concerns to virtual reality, augmented reality, and ubiquitous computing.
John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities
Edward Schiappa
Edward conducts research in argumentation, media influence, and rhetorical theory. His current research explores the relationship between rhetorical theory and critical media studies. He has published eleven books and his research has appeared in such journals as Philosophy & Rhetoric, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Review, Argumentation, Communication Monographs, and Communication Theory.
Professor of Comparative Media Studies
T.L. Taylor
T.L. is co-founder and Director of Research for AnyKey, an organization dedicated to supporting and developing fair and inclusive esports. She is a qualitative sociologist who has focused on internet and game studies for over two decades. Her research explores the interrelations between culture and technology in online leisure environments.
Courses taught
Research group affiliations
Professor of Comparative Media Studies
William Uricchio
William Uricchio revisits the histories of old media when they were new; explores interactive and participatory documentary; writes about the past and future of television; thinks about algorithms and archives; and researches narrative in immersive and interactive settings. He is founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Principal Investigator of the Co-Creation Studio. He was also Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands
Courses taught
CMS.790 Media Theories and Methods I
CMS.838 Innovation in Documentary: Technologies and Techniques
Research group affiliations
Assistant Professor of Global Civic Media
Sulafa Zidani
Sulafa researches global creative practices in online civic engagement across geopolitical contexts and languages such as Mandarin, English, Arabic, Hebrew, and French. She has published on online culture mixing, Arab and Chinese media politics, and critical transnational pedagogy. Currently, Sulafa is working on her book called Global Meme Elites: How Meme Creators Navigate Transnational Politics on the Multilingual Internet.
Graduate Students
Laurel Carney, ’22
Research Assistant, Open Documentary Lab
Laurel is a writer from California. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California, Davis, where she studied early modern execution laws.
A lifelong gamer, she is interested in communities formed around rule-breaking in virtual worlds and the ways developers push back against “deviant” play via punitive systems and environmental design.
Emily Grandjean, ’22
Research Assistant, Visiting Prof. Laura Partain
Emily is a researcher, writer, and technologist primarily focused on issues related to the environment, public health, and wellness. She has worked as a freelance UX researcher for various tech clients in Silicon Valley. She also has collaborated with many professors and academics at Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government on book chapters, book proposals, case studies, articles, and computer simulations. She earned a B.A. in Economics from Wellesley College.
Tomás Guarna, ’22
Research Assistant, Visiting Prof. Eric Gordon
Tomás is a social scientist and media practitioner from Argentina. He is interested in civic media, digital governance, and the political effects of misinformation. Before joining CMS, Tomás received his B.A. in Social Sciences from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and worked for the Presidency of Argentina’s Digital Communications Team. Tomás is a Human Rights & Technology Fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies.
Srushti Kamat, ’22
Research Assistant, Open Documentary Lab
Srushti is a writer/producer examining the intersection of filmmaking, emerging technology and civic participation. Born in Mumbai, India, she was raised in Singapore and earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree (Hon.) in History and Journalism from the University of Oregon. At MIT, she is keen to expand upon virtual space-creation and the tools it can provide for impending and ongoing global issues within health, education and activism.
Alison Lanier, ’22
Alison Lanier is a Cambridge-based writer and editor who specializes in media studies with an emphasis on queer theory and narrative. She studied film at Wellesley College and received her MFA in fiction from University of Massachusetts Boston. Her current studies focus on media theory through video games, with a focus on how bodies are conceptualized and rendered within digital spaces. She is interested in exploring how gender can be both portrayed and disrupted through gaming contexts and imagined characters.
JJ Otto-Hawke, ’22
Research Assistant, Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab
JJ (they/he) is a writer, researcher, and game designer most recently from Minneapolis, MN. They graduated from the University of Rochester with a BA in Psychology and a BS in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. They’re passionate about thoughtful representation in games, novel approaches to storytelling, and making TTRPGs accessible to new and diverse players. They aim to create a TTRPG that allows players to test creative ways to organize society and relationships, in addition to helping players empathize with others and critically analyze the world around them.
G. R. Marvez, ’22
Research Assistant, Teaching Systems Lab
Marvez is an education technology researcher and designer focused on helping teachers prepare to facilitate difficult discussions through digital conversation simulators with the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT. They hope to to prime all teachers for leading engaging discussions with their students. They earned an S.B. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences with a concentration in Education from MIT.
Ámbar Reyes, ’22
Research Assistant, Open Documentary Lab
Ámbar is a filmmaker and media researcher from Mexico. She has a deep interest in the documentary as a way to explore, represent and engage with the world. Her work revolves around questions of memory, migration, and identity. Ámbar believes that co-creation and storytelling through a multiplicity of voices is a powerful way to delve into unspoken and underappreciated perspectives of social phenomena.
Abby Sun, ’22
Research Assistant, Open Documentary Lab
Abby is a filmmaker, writer, and programmer who curates the DocYard, a biweekly screening series at the Brattle. She has written for Film Comment, Filmmaker Magazine, Film Quarterly, and Hyperallergic, and served as an industry representative on panels for the NEA, SFFILM, CAAM, the LEF Foundation, IDA, and other filmmaker funding and support organizations. Her latest short film, “Cuba Scalds His Hand” (co-directed with Daniel Garber), premiered at Maryland Film Festival in 2019.
Research Scientists
[View their full bios at cmsw.mit.edu/people.]
Research Scientist
Mikael Jakobsson
Mikael conducts research at the intersection of game design and game culture. He investigates how gaming activities fit into social and cultural practices, and how this knowledge can inform the design and development process. He works with MIT Game Lab, where he also is teaches classes in game studies and game design.
Courses taught
CMS.841 Introduction to Videogame Theory
CMS.842 Playful and Social Interaction Design Exploration
Research group affiliations
Research Scientist
S.M., CMS, ’03
Philip Tan
Philip is the creative director for the MIT Game Lab. He teaches undergraduate subjects CMS.608 Game Design and CMS.611J/6.073J Creating Video Games. For six years, he was the executive director for the US operations of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a game research initiative. 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.
Research group affiliations
Research Scientist
Meredith Thompson
Meredith draws upon her background in science education and outreach as a research scientist and lecturer for the Scheller Teacher Education Program. Her research interests are in collaborative learning, STEM educational games, and using virtual and simulated environments for learning STEM topics.
Research group affiliations
Research Scientist
Sarah Wolozin
Sarah develops and oversees lab projects, operations, and collaborations. She is the founder and editorial director of Docubase, co-founder and editor-at-large of Immerse, and co-founder of the Co-Creation Studio. Before arriving at MIT, she produced award-winning documentaries and educational media for a wide variety of media outlets including PBS, Learning Channel, History Channel, NPR, websites and museums.
Research group affiliations
Core Staff
[View all CMS/W staff at cmsw.mit.edu/people.]
Ladybird
Ladybird appears on campus frequently to greet visitors to 14N-338, herd lost graduate students, accept treats, and do tricks. She has studied Agility and Obedience, and considers herself a reasonably good frisbee dog. She likes peanut butter, chasing geese, and people who feed her.
Shannon Larkin
Academic Administrator
Shannon works primarily with the graduate programs in CMS and Science Writing. She hands out handing out advice, truffles, and Kleenex and is also a professional singer and singing teacher.
Yihyun Lim
Director, Civic Design Lab
Yihyun currently directs projects across a variety of industries from finance and banking, urban lighting and consumer products, energy, and sportswear. She brings together behavioral research and design methods to situate emerging networked technologies in the current and future societies.
Andrew Whitacre
Communications Manager
Andrew runs communications for Comparative Media Studies/Writing, with a focus on the CMS graduate program. His work stretches from senior-level project collaboration to print and web design, social media campaigns, and multimedia storytelling.
