Graduate | Current Graduate Students
Our current graduate students research and teach a diverse range of topics. They may be contacted through email.
A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z
A
Laura Asbury: Audience and Filmic reaction to econimic crisis, protrayals of gender, starlets in hollywood studio syste, development and evolution of entertainment for children
B
Mark Benedetti: Underground cinema
Lisa Braverman: Rhetorics of space and place, intersections of performance studies and rhetoric, political participation, Israel
Shana Bridges: US political rhetoric, especially discourses of democracy, deliberation, and citizen incivility
Cara Buckley-Ott (Colorado State University): Rhetoric and queer theory with a particular interest in queer kinship and queer identity; the resistive potential of mediated representations of fag hags
Konrad Budziszewski: Media, particularly film and videogame studies, with emphasis on issues of gender and sexuality
C
Lindsey Campbell-Badger:
Josh Carney: Representations of US politics in Turkish news media, experience in Turkey
Allison Chelloew: Rhetoric and cultural studies, orgins of rhetoric, contemporary application, rhetoric and public culture (not specific)
Aleena Chia: New media; digital media technologies and forms of selfhood
Kasia Chmielewska: Research interests are situated the intersection of gender and media studies, with special focus on Internet studies. Her dissertation project is a historical and critical investigation into the form and function of the Internet in a national context. She examines the emergence of Polish blogosphere, and the ways in which women’s blogs contribute to our understanding of nationally-specific gender and media formations
David Church: Horror, cult, and exploitation cinema; reception studies; taste politics; home film cultures; disability studies; cultural memory
Robert Clift: Media, rhetorical and ethnographic theory, documentary film, race, identity negotiations
Joshua Coonrod: Violent genres and children, within the larger question of how film has visualized children; trauma studies; horror films; stigma
Byron Craig: Rap, rhetoric, race
Emily Cram: Rhetorics of bodies/embodiment, visual culture & citizenship, rhetorics of social movements, political emotion/affect studies, rural queer studies, fat studies
D
Aneliya Dimitrova: Forms of heritage stewardship, tourism, and urban space organization; performances of national identity; socialist culture in the context of pre- and post-socialism (with Bulgaria as a case study)
Jeremiah Donovan: Media theory, Television Studies
Emily Downing: Relationship between rhetoric and philanthropy through studying the language, visual images, and body rhetoric that non-profit organizations use to contrain and construct the identity of their audiences
F
Danielle Fernandez: Metaphors that govern public attitudes to immigrants, media respresentations of immigrants, immigrations enforcement justice, immigrants as threat to national security, need for immigrant voices, linking social action and scholarship
Amanda Fleming: Serial killer narratives in popular culture, fan studies and 'bad'
fandom, historical reception studies, television studies, narrative
theory, genre theory, auteur theory, horror film, children's films,
national film/history (England, France, Brazil), and 16mm silent film
production.
Sarah Florini: Race and media, African American and African Diaspora studies, critical
race theory, alternative media, cultural memory, performance studies, cyberculture studies, and popular music
G
Yuliyana Gencheva: Anthropology of childhood, representations of the child; socialist culture (Balkans - Bulgaria; China), socialist aesthetics; semiotics; ecology of culture (questions of culture's preservation and significance); Chinese film (Fifth Generation directors); post-socialist memory in Bulgaria (incl. popular representations, scholarly debates); performance studies
Christopher Gilbert: Intersection of rhetorical and cultural studies, role of political humor in the problem of public judgment, civic education and critical pedagogy, recovery of ancient rhetorics for contemporary rhetorical critique
Antonio Golan: Public memory within the Spanish state; the role of memory in political conflict; radical dissent and rhetoric; and anarchist rhetoric
Jeremy Gordon: Rhetoric, peace and conflict, visual culture, journalism/photojournalism, digital culture, theatre arts, social justice, pedagogy/service learning
Sara Gray: Rhetorics of the body, with a particular focus on disability. Questions of identity of marginal groups, cultural myths, postcolonial rhetoric, legal discourse
Noelle Griffis: American avant-garde influence on "New Hollywood" film; "pre-cinematic" education os New Hollywood directors; historiography of relationships between avant-garde artists and filmmakers
Ben Grimwood: Sexual politics and Hollywood cinema; gender/genre performance; Camp, feminist, and queer interpretation; popular cultural criticism (http://reachingcriticalmass.tumblr.com/)
Matthew Guschwan: Italian soccer fans, ethnography of social media, consumer culture
H
William "Mack" Hagood: Ethnographic research in sound studies, new media, popular music, performance. Dissertation - ""Sonic Technologies of the Self" " Mediating Sound, Self, and Sociality
Mark Hain: Silent-era cinema; reception studies; fan and audience studies; star studies; cultural memory studies; identity; remediation; children's media; horror films; lost films; queer theory; camp; representations of masculinity; German cinema; film archiving and preservation
Lori Hall-Araujo: Research takes a performance studies approach to identity construction through dress and costume particularly for Latin/a/o Americans. Her dissertation addresses these concerns through Chiquita banana inspiration Carmen Miranda and the Hollywood star's co-created meanings about Brazilianness
Aaron Harmon: Politics of food, interconnected perspectives on the political aspects of the production and distribution of food, food studies
Jessica Harris:
Eric Harvey: Media ideologies and the creation of musical value
Meredith Heil: Queer theory, gender studies, youth culture and punk music in the context of subcultural studies, regionality and the process of radicalization, media ethnography
Shana Heinricy: Rhetorical theory, television studies, gender and ethnicity studies, American studies, consumer culture
Jennifer Heusel: Areas of interests include Rhetoric and Public Culture, Race, Higher Education, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Local, United States
James Hook: Theories of high and low culture, camp aesthetics in cult cinema, the sociology and politics of taste, horror films (and representations of the rural), reception studies and the role of nostalgia
I
Laura Ivins-Hulley: Animation studies, animated performances, Czech surrealism, and film and video production
J
Julie Johnson Searcy: Ethnography and cultural performance, gender, circulation, medical discourse, science and technology studies, reproduction and HIV/AIDS
Jennifer Jones: Film studies, documentary, cultural studies, historiography, gender studies, stardom, background in documentary production
K
Amanda Keeler: Silent cinema history, educational media, historiography, contemporary television, history of broadcasting, film and video production
Andrea Kelley: Intersections of U.S. cinema and popular music, media exhibition, history of media and technologies, African American Film, and culture studies
Suncem Kocer: Ethnography and performance studies, identity, ethnicity, media
L
Michael Lahey: Docu-drama narrative films and their relationship to nonfiction cinema
Julie Lavelle: Serial storytelling; popular culture narratives; film and television genres; gender, class, and mass culture
Martin Law: American Civil Rights rhetoric; the effect of temporal restrictions and contingencies on rhetorical constructions of race and national identity; Apocalyptic rhetoric and its role in narrativizing American race politics
Eran Livni: Performance studies, ethnography of reception, pop-folk music genres in the Balkas and the Middle East
Melanie Loehwing: Themes of rhetoric, law, homelessness, and citizenship, legal policies passed on local, state, and national levels as they characterize and criminalize the homeless; competing notions of the home as a primary site for cultivating citizenship
MC
Dave McAvoy: The relationshp between British early modern (Renaissance) and contemporary media formations, theories of violence and excess, theories of social networks/articulations and the so-called "public sphere"
Cole McGuffey: Continental Philosophy, Rhetorical theory/history, Environmental movements, popular culture, religious narratives, and public address
Hannah McSwiggen: Trash cinema, B movies, the American Cartoon (1928-1960)
M
Bilal Maanaki: Prayer and Islamic prayer in its form, poetics, and ritualism. Prayer as theatre
Abigail Mack: Narrative and Ethnographic Technique, Rhetoric of Silence or Voicelessness, US Prison System, and Democracy
Scott Makstenieks: Domestic and international foreign policy rhetoric with a focus on Middle Eastern political dynamics surrounding articulations of democracy and the influence of nationalistic and Islamic cultural traditions
David Maxson: Rhetoric of demagoguery and threat construction; rhetorics of social movements; persuasive power of music; intersections of history, culture, technology and daily life
Lori Morimoto: Japanese female fans of Hong Kong movies, East Asian cinema (Hong Kong and Japan), media spectatorship, media globalization, transnational cinema
Korryn Mozisek: Rhetoric of sport and citizenship
Rudo Mudiwa:
N
Mark Nagle:
Rhetoric, religion, secularism, public culture and public sphere theories, rhetorical pedagogy
David Naze: rhetorical studies, social protest rhetoric, rhetoric of race in sport
O
Jeffrey St.Onge:
Maria Fernanda Arias Osorio: Film reception studies, historical film audiences, cultural studies, Latin America cinema, B-movies
P
James Paasche: Medicated performances of "reality", rockumentary
Landon Palmer: Discourses of subcultural identity represented through popular music and musicians in British and American cinema. Additional research interests include jazz in animated children’s entertainment and the functions of sound recording technology in musical performance
Lorrie Palmer: Movie masculinity, global cinema, space/place/urbantheory, hypermedia, and American movie genres/history
Phillip Perdue: Visual dimensions of religious rhetoric in American politics; efficacy of religious symbolism in national identity and political life
Jessica Plassman: Environmental communication – performance of environmental identities, land allocation and national parks, environmental social justice, sustainability – visual rhetoric and public memory
Q
Jason Qualls: Melodrama (as media genre and as cultural mode), sexual politics and neoliberalism; camp; queer theories of affect and alterity
R
Stephen Rahko: Myth in American public culture, especially rhetoric of US foreign policy and economics, engaged pedagogy
Javier Ramirez: Spectatorship; spectator "pleasure" as distinct from entertainment, identity construction in cinema and popular culture, Chicano literature, cinema and multiculturalism, spectator identification in Latin American films
Justin Rawlins: Historical reception studies, film and theatre history, star/celebrity studies, acting studies, critical race theory, gender studies
Natasha Ritsma: Memory, war, documentary photograpy, films and filmmaker
Jessica Rivers: Ethnographic research ion slam poetry clubs in Manhattan
Issac Rooks: Colonial film policy, particularly in the British Commonwealth; Postcolonial film; Environmental horror films
Daniel Rosplock: Methods of queer advocacy and identity performance in rural and culturally diverse communities
Margaret Rossman: Teen and Tween Culture, Female Audiences and Fans, Viral Marketing and New Media
Jessica Rudy: Presentation and constructions of gender and queer identity in reality television and popular culture
Brian Ruh: Japanese comics and animation
S
Ozan Say: Oral History and Folklore, performance of multi-culturalism in and between societies. Balkan and Middle Eastern Cultures and Languages
Cassandra Secrease: Performance studies with emphasis on Native American discourses, analyses of the 1969-1971 Native American occupation of Alcatraz
Shira Segal: Avant-garde and documentary cinema, representations of pregnancy and childbirth in experimental cinema and home movies, cultural memory, the relationship between the visual and the verbal, landscape and cinema
Leonard "Will" Scheibel: Film history and criticism; Hollywood cinema; directors and their reputations; performance and stardom; styles and genres; gender studies; postwar cinema and American culture; modernisms and mid-century modernity; film and media theory; cinema and literature
Jacquelyn Shannon :Rhetorics of (in)visibility, the body and embodiment particularly in performance of race, class, gender and sexuality, queer theory, notions of the sacred and profane, outlaw discourse and practices of resistance and transgression more broadly
Russell Sheaffer: Gender, sexuality, and queer theory as they relate to documentary, silent-era stag films, and experimental and avante garde film
April Smith: Rhetoric and media, global capitalism, American empire, dissent, and progressive activism in the 21st century
Cortney Smith: Rhetoric, race, the appropriation of mythical heroes in contemporary American culture, voices of dissent
Bridget Sutherland: Rhetoric and public culture, rhetorical construction of gender roles
T
Miranda Tedholm: Documentary and educational films. social-conscious documentary and filmmakers and filmmaking ideaology, values andmethodolgy
Kay Terrell: Vampire narrative and horror film, particularly intensive investigation of the funcion of the redemptive vampire narrative in relation to social stigmas and fears
U
Andy Uhrich: Illustrated lectures and early cinema, history of computer art, preservation and restoration of time-based media, amateur film and the origins of home video
V
Joshua Vasquez: Genre, Masculinity and Melancholy
Travis Vogan: Critical theory, documentary studies, American cultural history of music and sports
W
Bryan Walsh: Visual rhetoric, political emotion, memory, dissent against the "War on Terror"
Valerie Wieskamp: Gender, race, and ethnic representations in public discourse
Christopher Wilkins: Questions of race, civil rights, and the mobility of the term "blackness" in a global context: political resistance in American black power, exploitation films, Caribbean and post-colonial African media; silent cinema
Katie Williams: Intersections of rhetoric, performance, and media in the promotion of social/cultural/political identity; political narratives; rhetorical history
Y
Zepnep Yasar: Media reception, film exhibition sites (including film festivals) and moviegoing practices, transnational media circulation, emerging urban film culture(s) in Istanbul, media ethnographyBryan-Mitchell Young: Videogames, race, gender, and sexuality within the gamer subculture
Z
Jennifer Zale:
My main area of research interest is the influence of ballet on silent film, especially Russian silent film. While researching in Moscow I focused on Vera Karalli, a prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet who became one of the most prominent film stars in prerevolutionary Russia. I am also interested in Russian cinema in general as well as dance on screen from different time periods
Eric Zobel: Art as social action, experimental theater and film, performance studies
