PhD Research Profiles

  • Ifeanyi Awachie

    Moving Home: Place, Power, and Past in Transnational Nigerian Women’s Video Installations

    My project looks at transnational Nigerian women's video installations, with a focus on the filmmakers and artists Sheila Chukwulozie, Onyeka Igwe, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Zina Saro-Wiwa. The project explores how these filmmakers use video installations, as opposed to theatrical films, to harness movement, both within the frame and in the gallery space, to communicate their artistic projects and generate critical spectatorship.

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  • Ryan Banfi

    American Pinball: Game, Gambling, Licensing, and Community

    Drawing on ludology, gambling theory, narratology, and reception studies, my dissertation investigates pinball’s past by tracking and analyzing the game’s stages in the context of U.S. history.

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  • Leticia Berrizbeitia Añez

    Cinema is not a Luxury: A Feminist Diasporic Rewriting of Latin American Cineastes Prudencia Grifell and Margot Benacerraf

    Leticia Berrizbeitia Añez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Her research focuses on feminist film historiography, Latin American film studies, and its intersections with the experiences of gender and migration. Her interests include gender and queer studies, contemporary ethics, film-philosophy, and non-fiction media.

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  • Dominic Clarke

    My dissertation focuses on San Francisco based underground filmmaker Curt McDowell. Making films over a two-decade span, McDowell's works are both timeless and yet capture a specific moment in LGBTQ history, one specifically demarcated by AIDS. Mostly forgotten at this time, McDowell's films pushed gender and genre boundaries, and my analysis places them in conversation with other figures and milestones of LGBTQ film history.

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  • Leonard Cortana

    Memorializing assassinated anti-racist activists: transmediatic imaginaries and the rise of transnational and intersectional figures of resistance

    My doctoral research examines the transnational circulation of narratives about racial justice and activist movements between Brazil, South Africa, France & overseas departments, and the US, emphasizing the memorialization of political assassinations and the spread of the legacy of assassinated anti-racist activists.

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  • Anthony Dominguez

    City, Space, and Screen: Reconfiguring the History of Times Square

    In focusing on the development of urban screens in Times Square between 1908 to the present, I offer a new history of the Great White Way by examining the influence of global capitalism on public space, architecture, corporate advertising, military powers, and video-games.

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  • Anila Gill

    The Partitioned Self: Photography, Cinema, and Civic Memory in Lahore and Bombay (1930-1950)

    My dissertation offers three bodies of texts - photography, memoir, and cinema – as critical sites where Indian subjects worked through epistemic uncertainties under colonial regimes of sight and control. Deploying a method of anti-colonial untimeliness to project the Partition of India as a decelerated, unfinished historical moment, my research ultimately understands Partition as a process that dispersed fields of vision and produced divided perceiving selves.

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  • Da Ye Kim

    Finding Virtual Reality: An Atlas of VR Sites and Communities

    My dissertation maps out the diverse cinematic sites of Virtual Reality (VR) and explores the people who build, occupy, and politicize those sites. The composite, transdisciplinary method envisions an extensive cartography of the VR mediascape, paying a particular attention to sites and corporeal bodies that mobilize, structure and capitalize the VR ecosystem. I consider this project as a current historical research as VR is in its vibrant process of becoming.

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  • Ian Russell Lehine

    Black Soil Sandbox: The Spatial Lives of Ukrainian Videogames

    “Black Soil Sandbox” explores the digital and physical spaces of Ukrainian videogames through the lenses of media history, postmemory, eco-media, ludology, and game production. It locates the spaces of Ukrainian games within a history of cine-spatial representation and asks how they play a part in “putting Ukraine on the map”. The project will feature interviews with Ukrainian videogame developers, textual analyses of gameworlds, and a close look at the transnational communities of modders that collectively reimagine those games.

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  • Adam Segal

    Quality TV in the Multichannel Era

  • Justin Shanitkvich

    A Phenomenology of Taste in the Moving Image

    The aim of this dissertation is to illuminate the ways in which audiovisual media may stimulate or simulate a bodily taste response. I explore this dimension of what is largely film and television consumption with regard to a variety of practices, from animation to the European and American avant-garde and beyond.

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  • Negar Taymoorzadeh

    Melodramatic Responses to Modernization across Turkey's Yesilcam cinema and Iran's FilmFarsi

    I work on transnational melodrama, particularly on the historical interconnections between Egyptian Golden Age melodrama, Turkey’s popular cinema (Yesilcam), and Iran’s pre-revolutionary popular Cinema (FilmFarsi).

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  • Lauren I Treihaft

    My current doctoral research examines the ontological and epistemological limits of the contemporary discourse on temporality in an age defined by endless information streams, screen time, and binge-watching. I am interested in how our changing experience and perception of time is reflected globally in nascent cinematic forms and televisual modes.

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  • Juan Camilo Velásquez

    One Hundred Years of Simultaneity: A Comparative Analysis of Interwar and Contemporary Visual Media

    My dissertation compares theories and techniques of simultaneity in interwar cinema and in contemporary audiovisual media. Superimpositions, split screens, rear projections, blue screens, and even the union of sound and image introduced a new set of representational possibilities as two or more durations could coexist in the same image, which in turn produced new modes of spectatorship. I argue that to understand contemporary habits of distraction and aesthetic contemplation, it is crucial to consider this history of simultaneity in the moving image.

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  • Ann Lyuwenyu Zhang

    Keeping Other Memories: Inside Unofficial Chinese Moving Image Archives

    Situated between historiography and cultural studies, my dissertation records and elucidates the cultures of various scales of unofficial Chinese moving image archives. It theorizes the archive as an important yet overlooked nexus point that functions as a site of memory-making activities generating cultural discourses in contemporary China.

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