News/Research

BCNM's Recent Graduates from the Designated Emphasis in New Media

07 May, 2013

BCNM's Recent Graduates from the Designated Emphasis in New Media

Brooke Belisle, Ph.D. in Rhetoric with Designated Emphasis in New Media and Film, has been elected as a 2013 New Faculty Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and will join Stony Brook University’s Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory.

Belisle studies intersections of visual culture, technology, and critical theory. She describes her teaching and writing as a way to address digital media through the history of cinema and photography, and situate emerging media practices within broader philosophical and cultural perspectives. Belisle received a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a master’s degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Her scholarship in comparative media studies and visual culture studies focuses on the history and theory of digital media, cinema and photography.

Alenda Chang, Ph.D. in Rhetoric with a Designated Emphasis in New Media will be an Assistant Professor of English in Environmental Studies and Digital Humanities at the University of Connecticut.

Her dissertation titled "Playing Nature: The Virtual Ecology of Game Environments" analyzes game environments and their social and cultural effects on the natural environment. Her research interests span film, new media, science, and literature, and her dissertation addresses the topic of environment and ecology in virtual worlds and other digital media.

Miki Kaneda, Ph.D. in Music with a Designated Emphasis in New Media, has been a part of The Museum of Modern Art as a Mellon C-MAP Fellow in the Department of Painting and Sculpture since 2012 and will hold the position through July 2013. Most recently she was been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.

The fellowship covers a 10-month period, beginning in September 2013 and offers an opportunity for Ph.D.s of exceptional promise to turn their dissertations into publishable manuscripts. Kaneda will continue refining her dissertation, "The Unexpected Collectives: Intermedia Art in Postwar Japan," an ethnographic and historical study of intermedia musical and artistic practices in 1960s Japan.


Kris Fallon, Ph.D. in Film & Media with a Designated Emphasis in New Media through the Berkeley Center for New Media will be the Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor in Digital Culture at UC Davis. He will be teaching classes, organizing workshops and mentoring Graduate Students from across the University interested in critically analyzing the impact of digital media on their traditional disciplines and the culture at large.

Kris Fallon's dissertation, titled "Where Truth Lies: Digital Media and Political Documentary 2000-2012" looks specifically at the collision of documentary film and digital media in the United States post 9/11. He demonstrates that the political conflict of the Bush Era pushed activists and artists to experiment with a range of tools that blended image making with other technologies social networks, games, virtual environments and data analytics.

SeungWan Hong, Ph.D. in Architecture with a Designated Emphasis in New Media through the Berkeley Center for New Media will be Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer with the department of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion - Israel Technology of Institute.

SeungWan Hong's dissertation, titled "The Affordance of Online Multiuser Virtual Environments (MUVE) for Creative Collaboration," looks at 40 comparative experiments in creative collaboration using two modes of creative collaboration: MUVE and sketching, in face-to-face collaboration, and in remote collaboration. He hopes the research will contribute to the development of creative collaboration methods using MUVE to foster creativity in architectural design.