Lyman Fellowship
Peter Lyman
The Peter Lyman Graduate Fellowship in new media, established in the memory of esteemed UC Berkeley Professor Peter Lyman, provides a stipend to a UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate to support the writing of his or her Ph.D. dissertation on a topic related to new media. The fellowship is supported by donations from Professor Barrie Thorne, Sage Publications and many individual friends and faculty.
Applications for summer 2024 are now closed. Applications are due on February 1, 2025.
To apply, please fill in this form with your dissertation description.
Some preference will be given to those doing research related to children and youth, to BCNM Designated Emphasis students, and to projects that focus on women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, Global South, ability diverse, and socioeconomically disadvantaged peoples as makers and users of new media. If relevant, please explain how your project foregrounds one or more of these communities. Originality and quality of research are, however, the primary criteria.
The amount of the stipend depends on the size of the fund. In 2024 the fellowship amount was $7,000.00.
You must be a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student who has passed your qualifying exams to apply.
Interested in other BCNM resources? Check out all the graduate opportunities here!
Lyman Fellows in New Media
2024
Vincente Perez
Ph.D. Candidate in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
S_onic Blackness
Vincente Perez believes that approaching Hip-Hop and Poetry as separate phenomena is a misrepresentation of their capacity to elucidate the poetics of Blackness and Black sound. He intervenes in this tendency and reads rappers and poets together as theorists and practitioners who sound Blackness otherwise, in registers attuned to the nuance of Black life lived in the midst of "social death." His dissertation reads poets and rappers like Noname, Saul Williams, and Saba alongside academic theory to trace the many ways that Black social life is rendered dead, mute, and incapable of complexity within the frameworks provided by western humanism. He works within “afterlife methodologies”, a significant paradigm shift that emphasizes the way that “past” epochs haunt the material and affective present. Afterlife methodologies help Vincente expose how whiteness manifests as white noise, his term to describe the attempts to control the meaning of sound as only that which makes sense according to enlightenment ideals.
Read more here.
2023
Rashad Arman Timmons
Ph.D. Candidate in African American Studies
Brutal Traffic | Pedestrian Acts: Blackness, Geography, and Performances of Infrastructural Violence
Rashad’s dissertation explores infrastructures as sites of racial subjection and black radical possibility across time in Ferguson, Missouri. He investigates how the city’s railway, roadway, and media infrastructures have intersected with projects of race-making and geographic domination from the mid-nineteenth century forward. Using archival, geographic, and textual analyses, Rashad interrogates how these infrastructures produce the experiences of social terror, corporeal vulnerability, and premature death historically wed to blackness. He also examines how black subjects disrupt these relations through everyday performances of political refusal. Tracing this dynamic, Rashad introduces “traffic” to name patterns of infrastructural violence that codify gendered racial difference, naturalize uneven geographies, foreclose black mobility, and mediate black bodily injury. Conversely, he interrogates how black subjects impede infrastructural violence, or stop traffic, through “pedestrian acts.” These are practices of infrastructural interference that affect contraventions of racial and spatial order. By examining the palimpsestic violence of traffic and the emancipatory potential of pedestrian acts, Rashad’s dissertation illuminates how infrastructures in Ferguson stage intensive struggles over race, space, and power.
Read more here.
2022
Julia Irwin
Ph.D. Candidate in Film & Media
Patterning Recognition: A History of Automated Visual Perception
In light of the U.S. military’s twenty-first-century embrace of pattern recognition techniques for automating image interpretation and targeting procedures, Julia examines how pattern recognition became the dominant mode of optical perception in institutional settings. It inquires into the conditions that enabled human sight to be conceived as an automatable entity and the politics inherent in the process of translating perceptual experience into a machine-readable and -executable format. Taking cues from the field of computer vision today, Julia identifies three modalities of vision—proprioceptive sensing, object detection, and behavior pattern recognition—and historicizes each. The objects of study are twentieth-century industrial, military, and academic programs for training human visual perception for institutional purposes that have, implicitly and explicitly, informed the design and deployment of today’s software. A methodological and critical intervention into contemporary discourse on computer vision bias, which emphasizes algorithms’ simultaneous black-boxed and agential nature, Julia’s conceptual and media history demonstrates the ways in which the mechanisms of pattern recognition are present in proto-algorithmic form in these earlier instances of trained human vision. Studying them can render today’s opaque systems more legible.
Read more here.
2021
Lashon Daley
Ph.D. Candidate in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
Black Girl Lit: The Coming of (R)age Performances in Contemporary U.S. Black Girlhood Narratives, 1989-2019
Lashon's dissertation charts how literature, film, television, and social media has helped shape our cultural understanding of what it means to be young, Black, and female in the U.S. By uniquely combining extensive research from African American literary studies, Black girlhood studies, and performance and new media studies, Lashon assembles compelling cultural artifacts that call attention to the increasing love for and theft of youthful Black femininity in American culture. As evidence, she centers cultural artifacts as wide-ranging as the 1990s sitcom Family Matters (1989-1998) and social media hashtags such as #blackgirlmagic. By centering the gendered and racialized representations of Black girls, Black Girl Lit persists in dismantling negative stereotypes of Black girls, while also providing important insight in how to recover, repair, and redeem mediated representations of their girlhood.
Read more here.
2020
Anushah Hossain
Ph.D. Candidate in the Energy and Resources Group
A Multi-lingual Internet
Anushah asks how we came to have a multi-lingual internet and seeks to answer the question through a historical and ethnographic study of the tools and peoples that helped construct it in South Asia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, a group of Bangladeshi activists formed, whose mission it was to “bring Bangla into the digital age.” Their fervor for their language from the liberation war fought in 1971 over the right to speak Bangla in what used to be Pakistan translated directly into a vision for a digital environment in their own language. Anushah’s dissertation traces how the twin motivations of nationalism and techno-optimism in the hands of this Bangladeshi community laid the foundation for a Bangla computing stack.
Read more here.
2019
Cherise McBride
Ph.D. Candidate in Education
Becoming Designers of Digitally-Mediated Learning: A Situated Model of Digital Pedagogy
Cherise McBride’s dissertation project is an exploration into how teachers enrolled in a graduate-level technology course came to understand, reveal and apply sociocultural knowledge in their designs of digitally-mediated learning. Using data from a larger research project entitled “Developing the Digital Pedagogy of Pre-Service Teachers,” the dissertation explores teacher learning from a sociocultural perspective (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 1994; Sannino & Engeström, 2010) and offers a model for culture knowledge as a salient knowledge domain in designs of digitally-mediated learning (Mahiri, 2011).
Cherise’s dissertation study applies qualitative methods including multi-sited ethnography and digital ethnography to trace the meaning-making practices of teachers as they engaged in multimodal composing, participatory networks, and learning design in a community of learners. Preliminary findings suggest a model of digital pedagogy that centers the lived realities of students, critical literacies, and robust understandings of the affordances and constraints of technological tools in sociocultural contexts. These findings contribute to the literature in a way that resists the notion of digital tools in urban schools as digital panacea (Philip & Garcia, 2013), and instead illuminates the role of pedagogy, sociopolitical context, and critical digital literacies in teachers’ agentive roles as designers of mediated learning. Findings from this study will have implications for literacy scholarship, research on digital technologies, and teacher education research and practice.
Read more here.
2018
Grace Gipson
Ph.D. Candidate in African American Studies, D.E. in New Media
Nicholaus Gutierrez
Ph.D. Candidate Rhetoric, D.E. in New Media
Read more here.
2017
Ritwick Banerji “An Astromusicological Study of the Maxineans”
Ph.D. Candidate in Music, D.E. in New Media
Renée Pastel “War on Terror”
Ph.D. Candidate in Film and Media, D.E. in New Media
Read more here.
2016
Jenni Higgs “Digital Talk”
Ph.D. Candidate in Education, D.E. in New Media
Read more here.
2015
Kyle Booten “Quotation Practices”
Ph.D. Candidate in Education, D.E. in New Media
Read more here.
2014
Tiffany Ng “Classical Music in the Chinese Global City: New Performing Arts Centers and the Formation of a Cosmopolitan Public”
Ph.D. Candidate in Music, D.E. in New Media
Read more here.
2013
T. Geronimo Johnson “New Media Literacy, Aesthetic Education, and Ambiguity in the Age of Irony”
Ph.D. Candidate in Language, Literacy and Culture Division, Graduate School of Education, D.E. in New Media
Read more here.
2012
Katherine Chandler “Unmanned Aerial Systems: The United States’ Techno-Political Entanglements in the Post-Cold War”
Ph.D. Candidate in Rhetoric, D.E. in New Media
2011
Jen Schradie “Class (and Ideology) Confronts Online Activism: Digital Democracy or Disenfranchisement?”
Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology, D.E. in New Media
2010
Christo Sims “Youth Practices with New Media and the Production of Social Difference”
Ph.D. Candidate, UC Berkeley School of Information
2009
Janaki Srinivasan “The Political Life of Information: Information and Development in India”
Ph.D. Candidate, UC Berkeley School of Information