Faculty
[View their full bios at cmsw.mit.edu/faculty.]
Director of Graduate Studies
Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media
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: Culture and Media in 21st century Cuba, 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
Heather Hendershot
Heather studies conservative media and political movements, film and television genres, and American film history. She is is particularly interested in the complicated relationship between “extremist” and “mainstream” conservatism and in how that relationship is negotiated by conservative media. Her courses emphasize the interplay between industrial, economic, and regulatory concerns and how those concerns affect what we see on the screen.
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 books include The Future and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities and several books of computational poetry: 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
Assistant 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 ten 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 revisits the histories of old media when they were new; explores interactive and participatory documentary; writes about the past and future of television; thinks a lot about algorithms and archives; and researches cultural identities and the question of “Americanization” in the 20th and 21st centuries. He is Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and faculty director of the MISTI-Netherlands Program. He is 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
S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Media and Cultural Studies
Jing Wang
Jing is the founder and director of MIT New Media Action Lab and serves as the Chair of the International Advisory Board for Creative Commons China. She is also the founder and secretary-general of NGO2.0, a grassroots nonprofit organization based in Beijing and Shenzhen. Her current research interests include entertainment media in China and the US, advertising and marketing, civic media and communication, social media action research, and nonprofit technology.
Courses taught
Graduate Students
Diego Cerna Aragon, ’21
Research Assistant, Open Documentary Lab
Diego is a technology and media researcher from Peru. His work focuses on discourse analysis, expert knowledge and the uses of new technologies. At CMS, he researches the practices employed by experts, journalists, and government officials to combat disinformation in the Peruvian public sphere.
Will Freudenheim, ’21
Research Assistant, The Education Arcade
Will is a researcher and game designer. His work is focused on investigating how people read and ascribe meaning to their environments through emerging media platforms, and considering new applications of contextual media in the development of educational tools.
Emily Grandjean, ’22
Research Assistant, Civic Design Initiative
Emily is a researcher, writer, coder, and designer. Her research interests focus on public health, crisis studies, and narratives of place and self. While an undergraduate at Wellesley College, she conducted research on economic inequality and renewable energy markets at MIT Sloan and the Harvard Kennedy School, respectively. After graduation, she worked in strategy consulting. Later at Harvard Business School, she helped write book chapters and business cases on the history of ethics, spiritual values, and environmentalism in the private sector.
Tomás Guarna, ’22
Research Assistant, Visiting Prof. Eric Gordon
Tomás is a social scientist and media practitioner from Argentina. He is interested in critical infrastructure studies, data privacy, and the geopolitics of Internet access. At CMS, he answers questions like: how do citizens in the Global South experience the possibilities of the Internet, and how does this change compared to users in the North? How can Internet access be democratized?
Elon Justice, ’22
Research Assistant, Open Documentary Lab and Prof. Vivek Bald
Elon is a videographer and writer with an interest in digital media platforms and co-creative storytelling. An Eastern Kentucky native, Elon has long been acutely aware of media portrayals of underrepresented populations that are often one-dimensional, stereotypical, or altogether inaccurate. She aims to combat this phenomenon by working alongside these populations to co-create media that allows for more varied and truthful representations of their regions.
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.
Andrea Kim, ’21
Research Assistant, Open Documentary Lab
Andrea is a documentarian and media-maker interested in how media technologies and storytelling practices build social narratives. She is interested in participatory learning and socio-cultural exchange in the context of an increasingly globalized world.
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.
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.
Michael Sugarman, ’21
Research Assistant, Civic Design Initiative
Mike is a writer, musician, and organizer in underground music interested in the technologic and interpersonal means that communities use to build and maintain themselves. He hopes to further pursue community-strengthening media practices during his graduate research in CMS
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.
Kelly Wagman, ’21
Research Assistant, Open Documentary Lab
Kelly is a researcher, technologist, and designer. She is interested in understanding how we can design and build inclusive and ethical sociotechnical systems. In previous work she has examined the effects of disconnecting from Facebook and looked at public perceptions of digital assistants through memes and search queries.
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
Associate Director of Graduate Studies
Scot Osterweil
Scot is Creative Director of the Education Arcade. He has designed award-winning games in both academic and commercial environments, focusing on what is authentically playful in challenging academic subjects.
Courses taught
CMS.615 Games for Social Change
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 work stretches from senior-level project collaboration to print and web design, social media campaigns, and multimedia storytelling.
