Nicole Starosielski Joins BCNM
We are thrilled to welcome Nicole Starosielski, a new Associate Professor in Film & Media, to the Berkeley Center for New Media's Executive Committee and Graduate Group!
Nicole Starosielski’s work on digital infrastructure and environmental implications of the digital has been groundbreaking in the field of Global Digital Media Studies, helping to reshape the discipline in the last decade. Her first book, The Undersea Network (Duke UP, 2015), counters discourses alleging the immateriality and resilience of the internet and its primarily urban character. She examines the large network of undersea cables that are the infrastructure and hence material grounding of the internet itself, transporting data globally while remaining hidden from everyday experience. This network follows the earlier routes of telephony and telegraphy that are complicit with colonialist imperatives. Starosielski’s second monograph, Media Hot and Cold (Duke UP, 2021), is an innovative interconnection of global warming, ecological issues, and digital media through an examination of temperature and its impact on the stability of infrastructure and the materiality of media. Here she analyzes the history of the thermal properties of various pre-digital media (photography, film, etc.) as well as of digital media. Professor Starosielski’s teaching includes courses on digital media and her specialization in eco-criticism, film, cultural studies, and media production.