PhD Research Profiles
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Ifeanyi Awachie
Curating Diasporic Nigerian Women Filmmakers
My project looks at diasporic Nigerian women’s filmmaking in the US and UK contemporary art worlds, with a focus on artists including Sheila Chukwulozie, Jenn Nkiru, and Zina Saro-Wiwa. I consider the curatorial approaches to these filmmakers and how they engage African diasporic audiences. I look particularly at the roles of informality, knowledge transmission, and cultural specificity in the mediation of the filmmakers’ work.
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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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Nathaniel Brennan
Film Theory and Wartime Intelligence: Research and Analysis at the Museum of Modern Art Film Library during World War II
My research focuses on the social, cultural, and intellectual histories of cinema in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. My dissertation explores the collaboration between the Museum of Modern Art Film Library and the federal government to derive useful intelligence from (primarily) captured enemy cinema during World War II.
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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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Zoe Meng Jiang
Technically Real: The Making of a Post-Mao Visual Regime, 1978-2001
My dissertation investigates the cultural logics of media technologies and how they participated in the process of truth-making in post-socialist China. The two decades after the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and before the admission of China in the World Trade Organization in 2001, mark a great transition of the country from socialism to its formal integration into the global Capitalist system. Media such as television, cinema and photography in this period were restructured by reform policies and changed from propaganda facilities to cultural industries. My project analyses how, in a time of unprecedented epistemological instability, a new perceptual environment mediated people’s idea about “what is the reality,” and how these new-found truths served or challenged existing state-society relations.
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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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Jasper Lauderdale
After the end of the world: Black radical alterity and the decolonizing of space and time in the speculative and the fantastic
My dissertation proposes that the critical and artistic paradigm I call Black radical alterity illuminates and coalesces oppositional, subversive, and utopian aesthetic strategies embedded and deployed in Black speculative art, in particular those works that conceive alternate pasts, presents, and futures.
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Ian Russell Lehine
Ian's research interests include Ukrainian Language/Culture, New Media/Virtual Reality (VR), and Soviet/Post-Soviet Film. Ian is a VR practitioner, an avid traveler, and a so-called "digital humanist" whose research is deeply influenced by his experiences abroad and his creative practice.
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Adam Segal
Quality TV in the Multichannel Era
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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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Ann Lyuwenyu Zhang
My research focuses on the history of the Chinese film archives—public and private alike—while theorizing the materiality and significance of the archive as a cultural object. I seek to question the ontology of the archive not only as a vessel of preservation but also as a living and evolving cultural organism that constructs the future through the preservation and remediation of the past.
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