Academic Biographies of the 2016 Conference Participants

Special thanks to the panel coordinators and Jane Gaines for helping compile the speaker bios.

Marsha Kinder (Professor Emerita, Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California)

Prof. Kinder is best known for her work on Spanish film, specifically Blood Cinema (1993); children’s media– Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games (1991); and digital culture–Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, The Arts and the Humanities (2014). She was founding editor of innovative journals Dreamworks, (winner of a Pushcart Award),and Spectator. In 1995 she received USC’s Associates Award for Creativity in Scholarship, and in 2001 was named a University Professor. In 1997 she founded The Labyrinth Project, an art collective and digital research initiative on interactive multimedia and database narrative that produced 12 multimedia projects that have had worldwide exposure. Kinder’s latest work, Interacting with Autism, a trilingual video-based website, was produced with Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Mark Harris and Scott Mahoy. Since retiring from teaching in 2013, Kinder has been writing Narrative in the Age of Neuroscience: The Discreet Charms of Serial Autobiography.

Steve F. Anderson (Assoc. Prof. of the Practice of Cinematic Arts, Univ. of So. California)

Steve Anderson is the author of Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past (Dartmouth 2011). Along with Tara McPherson, he is Co-Editor of the electronic journal Vectors and co-Principal Investigator of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, developers of the electronic publishing platform Scalar. He was the founding director of the Media Arts + Practice PhD program and currently directs the Transient Media Lab, home to an eclectic and deliberately unstable array of media, technology and design work. His current research project, Technologies of Cinema, comprises a long-form video essay, a critical digital archive and a print book supplement investigating images of technology as seen on TV and film since 1950. He teaches classes in the divisions of Media Arts + Practice, Interactive Media and Games and Critical Studies.

Deb Verhoeven (Professor & Chair of Media and Communication, Deakin University)

Deb Verhoeven was named Australia’s Most innovative Academic in 2013. A writer, broadcaster, film critic and commentator, Verhoeven is the author of more than 100 journal articles and book chapters, her most recent book  Jane Campion (Routledge, 2009). She is currently completing a manuscript, Serendipity in the Digital Humanities with Toby Burrows. Prof. Verhoeven was appointed Chair of Digital Humanities 2015 and is the Director of the Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI) project funded by NeCTAR (National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources), involving 13 universities and collecting institutions. Until 2012 she was Chair of the widely read film journal Senses of Cinema and was Editor for the journal Studies in Australasian Cinema (Intellect) in 2009/10.

Stephen Mamber (Professor & Vice Chair,Cinema and Media Studies, UCLA)

Stephen Mamber’s digital media courses include the seminars Issues in Electronic Culture, Computer Applications for Film Studies and Videogame Theory. Mamber is the author of the iPad app ClipNotes, which has been available in the App Store since November 2012. ClipNotes for Windows became available in November 2013 and recently received an Editor’s Pick Award from BestWindows8apps.net. Mamber’s Who Shot Liberty Valance? is now available as a free iPad app in the iTunes App Store, an experimental study of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962). His publications include Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (MIT Press). Mamber has also been the editor of Cinema magazine, and is a recipient of an Associated Press Golden Mike Award for his film criticism on Pacifica Radio.

Mark J. Williams (Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Dartmouth)

Mark J. Williams directed the Leslie Center Humanities Institute where he fostered the project entitled Cyber-Disciplinarity. In conjunction with the Dartmouth College Library, he is the founding editor of an e-journal, The Journal of e-Media Studies. With Adrian Randolph, he co-edits the book series Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture for the University Press of New England. He founded and has twice directed the Dartmouth off-campus program in Los Angeles for The Department of Film and Media Studies. With Michael Casey, he received an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant in 2011 to build the ACTION toolset for cinema analysis. In 2014 he received an award for Scholarly Innovation and Advancement at Dartmouth for directing The Media Ecology Project. In 2015 he received an NEH Tier 1 Research and Development grant with John Bell to build the Semantic Annotation Tool (SAT) for use in The Media Ecology Project. His book Remote Possibilities, a History of Early Television in Los Angeles, will be published by Duke University Press.

Rob King (Associate Professor, Film, Columbia University)

Rob King is a film historian with interests in American cinema, popular culture, and social history. Much of his work has been on comedy. His award-winning book, The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (University of California Press, 2009), examined the role Keystone’s filmmakers played in developing new styles of slapstick comedy for moviegoers of the 1910s. He has published articles on early cinema, class, and comedy in a number of anthologies and journals, and is the co-editor of three anthologies: Early Cinema and the “National” (John Libbey & Co., 2008), Slapstick Comedy (Routledge, 2010), and most recently Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks, and Publics of Early Cinema (John Libbey & Co., 2012). He is currently Associate Professor of Film at Columbia University, and is working on two projects: a historical study of short-subject filmmaking in early sound-era Hollywood; and a series of essays on new directions in contemporary American comedy.

Eric Hoyt (Assistant Professor of Media & Cultural Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Eric Hoyt is an Assistant Professor of Media & Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His teaching and research concentrate on digital media production, the Digital Humanities, and the past, present, and future of the media industries. Prior to moving to Wisconsin, he earned a Ph.D and M.F.A. at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. He co-directs the Media History Digital Library, and works closely with the project’s founder, David Pierce. He designed, developed, and produced the MHDL’s search and visualization platform, Lantern, which received the 2014 Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award from the Society for Cinema & Media Studies. His book, Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video (University of California Press, 2014), explores the history of how old movies became valuable. He has also published articles in Cinema Journal, The International Journal of Learning and Media, World Policy Journal, Jump Cut, and Film History.

Antonia Lant (Professor & Chair, Cinema Studies, NYU)

Antonia Lant is the author of Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema, and the editor of The Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writings on the First Fifty Years of Cinema (Verso, 2007). In addition to studying the impact of wartime privations on the film screen, and particularly the role that womanhood played in representing the nation in crisis, Antonia Lant’s research has more recently focused on the silent film era, analyzing its innovative aesthetics, its infatuation with things Egyptian, and its opportunities for both leisure and work for women. “Haptical Cinema” and “How the Cinema Contracted Egyptomania” suggested reasons for the prevalence of hieroglyphs, mummies and tombs on the screen.  Professor Lant is the founding director of the Cinema Studies department’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation MA program.

Jane Gaines (Professor, Film, Columbia University)

Jane Gaines, Professor of Film, Columbia University, is author of two books: Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice and the Law and Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era, both of which received the Katherine Singer Kovacs best book award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She received an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Scholarly Award for her forthcoming Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? and for work on the Women Film Pioneers digital archive published by Columbia University Libraries in 2013, research also supported by a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship. She has written articles on intellectual property and piracies, documentary theory and radicalism, feminism and film, early cinema, fashion and film, and critical race theory that have appeared in Cinema Journal, Screen, Cultural Studies, Framework, Camera Obscura, and Women and Performance. Most recently she has been working on a critique of the “historical turn” in film and media studies. Currently she directs the M.A. in Film and Media Studies at Columbia and serves on the Columbia University Press Board.

Howard Besser (Professor, Cinema Studies/ MIAP Director, NYU)

Howard Besser is the Director of New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation masters degree program (MIAP).  In addition to teaching MIAP courses, he teaches a regular Cinema Studies course on “New Media, Installation Art, and the Future of Cinema.”  His current research projects involve preserving digital public television, preserving and providing digital access to dance performance, preserving difficult electronic works, issues around copyright and fair use, Do-It-Yourself media, and the changing nature of media with the advent of digital delivery systems. Previously, he was a Professor of Information Studies at UCLA, where he taught and did research on multimedia, image databases, digital libraries, metadata standards, digital longevity, web design, information literacy, distance learning, intellectual property, and the social and cultural impact of new information technologies.

Anna McCarthy (Professor, Cinema Studies NYU)

Anna McCarthy is profess Cinema Studies department at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU University. She has edited several journals and anthologies including MediaSpace, Ambient Television, and The Citizen Machine. Completing her graduate studies at Northwestern University, McCarthy earned first prize at the 1997 Society for Cinema Studies Dissertation Awards, served as the Scholar-in-Residence at the Annenberg School of Communications, University of Pennsylvania, and served as a visiting researcher at the Center for Media and Cultural Communication at the University of Cologne, Germany. She has written on television history, sponsored film, education film, history of technology, material culture, cultural policy, governmentality, trauma, and biopolitics.

Marina Hassapopoulou (Visiting Assistant Professor, Cinema Studies, NYU)

Marina Hassapopoulou’s academic interests include digital media and participatory culture, interactive cinema, transnational cinema, European cinema, and hybrid pedagogy. She has published in Jump Cut, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Alphaville, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, and Screening the Past, on topics such as digital spectatorship, experimental and Hollywood cinema, fan studies, representations of Hellenism in U.S. media, and creative assignments for digital writing courses. She has also authored a book chapter in the anthology Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric, on transmedia storytelling and expanded television. She is currently working on Interactive Cinema: An Alternative History of Moving Images, which focuses on participatory experiments in the history of cinema. In addition, Marina is working on a web-based interactive historiographical project on European history.

Kimon Keramidas (Clinical Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities, John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought, NYU)

Kimon Keramidas is a cultural historian whose research focuses on the study of media and technology through the lenses of political economy and sociology of culture. Prof. Keramidas’ most recent project was the exhibition “The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing.” His research and teaching considers digital tools not only as objects of study, but also as a means for performing research and scholarship. Along with teaching courses at Draper within his fields of study, Kimon is also responsible for developing and teaching core courses for the Digital Humanities Master’s Certificate and organizing Digital Humanities initiatives across the Graduate School of Arts and Science. Kimon also helped found, and is on the editorial collective of, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and founded and is on the steering committee of New York City Digital Humanities.

Debashree Mukherjee (Asst. Professor, Middle Eastern, African, and South Asian Studies, Columbia University)

Prof. Mukherjee’s research is centered on Indian culture and film industries with a specialized focus on late colonial Bombay cinema. Her interests lie in film historiographic method, cultural labor, mediated urbanisms, visual technologies, and emerging cinematic practices. She has published on the historiographic productivity of scandal narratives in recuperating women’s film histories and the emergence of film journalism as a public discourse linking nationalism, stardom, and aspirational modern subjectivities. Her research has been funded by fellowships from the Charles Wallace India Trust, the American Institute for Indian Studies, and NYU’s Corrigan, Mainzer and Andrew Sauter grants. Trained as a filmmaker, Prof. Mukherjee worked in the Bombay film industry from 2004-2007 on films such as Omkara (d. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2006). She brings her knowledge of film production, aesthetics, ethnography, and archival work to her current book project, a new cultural history of early Bombay cinema (1920s-1940s). She curated an exhibition of Indian film ephemera in 2013, titled Maya Mahal and she is currently an editor of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies.

Vito Adriaensens (Adjunct Assistant Professor, Columbia University/ Assistant Professor, University of Antwerp)

Vito Adriaensens is Adjunct Assistant Professor and Visiting Scholar in the Film Division, Columbia University, School of the Arts, with a Fellowship from the Belgian American Educational Foundation. He holds a PhD from the University of Antwerp, was a visiting scholar at the University of Copenhagen, and has also taught at the School of Arts, University College in Ghent and the VU University in Amsterdam. His research has been published in Early Popular Visual Culture, CineAction, Kosmorama, and the Journal of British Cinema and Television, and he is currently finishing two books for Edinburgh University Press that will come out in 2016: the co-authored Sculpture in Cinema  deals with sculptural motifs from Georges Méliès’s animation of statues to experiments in expanded cinema, and the monograph Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames: The Art of Early European Cinema, with early European cinema’s appropriation of nineteenth-century theatrical and pictorial strategies. He is also the treasurer of Domitor, the international society for the study of early cinema.

Alex Gil Fuentes (Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Columbia University Libraries)

Alexander Gil Fuentes is the new Digital Scholarship Coordinator for the Humanities and History Libraries at Columbia University. He earned a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Virginia.

Mark Newton (Interim Director and Production Manager, Center For Digital Research and Scholarship, Columbia University)

Mark Newton is CDRS’ Interim Director and Production Manager. At CDRS, Mark’s work focuses on the development of the library’s scholarly publications partnership program, the Academic Commons institutional repository, and a variety of faculty- and student-led digital scholarship projects. He currently serves on the project staff for Humanities CORE, an NEH-funded digital humanities project with the Modern Language Association, pairing repository infrastructure with the MLA Commons community hub. Mark completed a Master of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and previously served as the Digital Collections Librarian at Purdue University.

Nicholas Wolf (NYU)

Nicholas Wolf is a data management librarian and member of library faculty at New York University, where he specializes in Irish linguistic, religious, and cultural history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Much of his current work centers on the history of the Irish language and of popular religion.

Marion Thain (Clinical Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies & Associate Director of Digital Humanities for the Faculty of Arts and Science, NYU)

Professor Marion Thain teaches literature, the arts, and Digital Humanities in the innovative interdisciplinary Global Liberal Studies program and in the English department at New York University, and is Associate Director for Digital Humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Her areas of interest include Late-Victorianism, aestheticism, decadence, modernism, British poetry and poetics of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the Digital Humanities.

Michael Tacca (Columbia University)

Michael Tacca is a recent graduate of Columbia University’s MA Film Studies program. He completed his master’s thesis on reenactment in contemporary documentary, focusing on the works of Joshua Oppenheimer and Rithy Panh. He studied as an undergraduate at Chapman University—earning a BFA in Film Production and a BA in German Studies.

NYU Cinema Studies, MCC & Columbia Film Graduate Students

Neta Alexander received her M.A. in Film from Columbia University and is currently a doctoral student in the department of Cinema Studies at New York University, researching streaming technologies and digital spectatorship. She is the recipient of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies’ Student Writing Award for 2016, and her articles have appeared in Film Quarterly, Media Fields Journal, and Jewish Film & New Media, among other publications. She has also authored book chapters in the forthcoming anthologies Compact Cinematics (Bloomsbury Publishing), The Netflix Reader (Bloomsbury Publishing), and Anthropology and Film Festivals (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

Pedro Cabello is a MA student in the Cinema Studies department at NYU. He had earned his degrees in Audiovisual Communication (Film and Television) and Art History at Complutense University in Madrid. He had also gained a M.A. degree in Spanish Cinema Studies (Rey Juan Carlos University, Madrid).He combines academic work with professional productions, working both in the TV and the cinema fields. Pedro has directed several documentaries and short films. His feature length documentary Cuéntame de dónde vienes (2009) has been screened in various festivals around the world, in places like Al-Hoceima (Morocco) and Mexico City. His next project, Hay que matar a Ex, will be released as an interactive fiction feature film.

Kelsey Christensen is a first-year MA student at NYU Tisch’s Cinema Studies program. Prior to that, she earned a bachelor’s degree in Film Studies at Smith College. You can visit her academic blog and online projects here: https://kelseyatthemovies.wordpress.com/

Da Ye Kim is a first- year Cinema Studies MA student at NYU Tisch’s Cinema Studies program. She is interested in research involving interactive cinema and new media. She studied Psychology and Theater Arts at Johns Hopkins University. You can visit Da Ye’s blog here: https://dayescinema.wordpress.com/

Michael Tacca is a recent graduate of Columbia University’s MA Film Studies program. He completed his master’s thesis on reenactment in contemporary documentary, focusing on the works of Joshua Oppenheimer and Rithy Panh. He studied as an undergraduate at Chapman University—earning a BFA in Film Production and a BA in German Studies.

Leo Goldsmith is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies and is currently writing his dissertation on found footage and historiography. He is also the Film Editor of The Brooklyn Rail, and a freelance writer, film programmer, and curator. His research interests include digital media, piracy, installation video, surveillance, and film criticism (history and practice).

Jasper Lauderdale is a first-year doctoral student in cinema studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and proudly resides in Brooklyn. He holds an undergraduate MA (Honors) in Film Studies and International Relations from the University of St Andrews and an MA in Cinema Studies from Tisch. Jasper has presented papers on the use of found footage and surveillance aesthetics in horror film at NYU and the University of Chicago, and on cinematic silence as a mode of feminist resistance to patriarchal language at Yale University. He is a filmmaker and editor, and has served as archivist and collections manager at the NYU Center for Media, Culture and History since 2013.

Luke Stark is doctoral candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University under the supervision of Helen Nissenbaum. His dissertation project, That Signal Feeling: Emotion and Interaction Design from Smartphones to the ‘Anxious Seat,’ examines the development of techniques and technologies for managing personal feelings from the rise of psychological theories of emotion in the late nineteenth century up to the present day use of mood-tracking apps. With a focus on affect, emotion, and digital media, Luke’s broader scholarship explores the changing nature of human subjectivity in the computational age. Luke holds an Honours BA in History & English and an MA in History, both from the University of Toronto; he has been generously funded by the National Science Foundation; New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, Center for the Humanities, and the Provost’s Global Research Initiatives; the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing; and Microsoft Research. Learn more at http://www.starkcontrast.co.