Welcoming Hannah Zeavin Back to BCNM!
We are thrilled to share that Hannah Zeavin has officially rejoined Berkeley as an assistant professor in the Department of History and the Berkeley Center for New Media, beginning July 1, 2023!
Hannah earned her Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University in 2018. She served as a Lecturer in the English and History Department at Berkeley and during this time contributed to BCNM as an Executive Committee member. Previously, she served as an assistant professor at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University.
Hannah’s research addressing overlooked narratives to train a historical lens on how technologies can mediate communication and distance is extraordinarily relevant to BCNM’s mission on studying and shaping media transition and emergence from diverse perspectives. Her award winning first book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021) provides a social and cultural history of the psychotherapeutic relationship, and argues that teletherapy is as old as the practice itself. This work not only contextualizes the current moment, but also recognizes the urgency of underrepresented spaces critical to life and existence.
Hannah’s research embodies BCNM’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. She engages with critical race studies and employs an abolitionist lens in her interrogations into networks of power. Her activist scholarship is exemplary and she has served in a pro-bono capacity as a consultant to non-profit mental-health organizations, such as The Trans Lifeline, a suicide hotline
She is also deft at interdisciplinarity, a hallmark of BCNM’s methodology, with an intellectual breadth that allows her to publish (prolifically!) in a range of academic journals from Technology and Culture to differences to the Japanese Journal of Transcultural Society as well as producing public scholarship for The New Yorker, Harpers, and Logic Magazine.
Hannah’s expertise on the history and theory of media and technology in the twentieth century will enrich our course offerings and the new media curriculum writ large. She has already developed numerous courses on the history of science and Silicon Valley for which she has routinely earned effusive responses in her student evaluations. In Spring 2024, Hannah will lead our core course NWMEDIA 200: History and Theory of New Media. She has also been a gifted mentor, serving unofficially on many of our student QE and dissertation committees while she was serving as a Lecturer in the past.
We are so excited to have Hannah as a collaborator at BCNM!