News/Research

BCNM Welcomes Newly Admitted Students to the DE and Certificate in New Media

04 Dec, 2012

BCNM Welcomes Newly Admitted Students to the DE and Certificate in New Media

We are very pleased to welcome new graduate students to our Designated Emphasis and Graduate Certificate programs:

DESIGNATED EMPHASIS

Andrea Horbinski is pursuing a Ph.D. in the History Department. Her research focuses on modern Japanese history and the emergence of manga (comic books) in the late 1910s and early 1920s until the turn of the 21st century. She is also interested in questions of fandom, fan culture and emergent/new media.

Kyle Booten is a doctoral candidate in Language, Literacy and Culture (Education) and is interested in issues of technologically-mediated intertextuality. His dissertation will focus on the creation of an online course platform for the GSE that foregrounds the student production of multimodal texts.

Valkyrie Savage is a second-year Ph.D. student Computer Science. She is currently working on design tools to aid the creative process with rapid prototyping tools. She plans to focus on tools that help teach principles of physical and electrical design and construction to young adults.

Ritwik Banerji is a third year graduate student in Ethnomusicology and is interested in the intersection of artificial intelligence with ethnomusicology and human-computer interaction. His research focuses on the development of a software-based musical agent “designed to improvise and sonically interact in real time with performers identifying as free improvisers.”

CERTIFICATE

Jessica Hankey is pursuing an MFA in Art Practice. Her work focuses on the relationships formed between cultural institutions (such as social clubs and neighborhood churches) and the buildings that house them. She is interested in how architecture (a technology of social engagement) relates to and coexists with new forms of social media that either lack or redefine a sense of place.

Sahar Khoury is a pursuing an MFA in Art Practice. She creates installations or experiences that focus on displacement and structural vulnerability. Her work is currently based in visual ethnography created from a mobile silkscreen cart that combines old and new media and technologies to create new mediums for “employment, social relationships, and critical thinking” amongst day laborers that gather in public spaces to find employment.