College of Media

Ph.D. students and their research

Current and recent Ph.D. students in the ICR:

John Anderson | jander26@illinois.edu
Anderson's primary research interests revolve around the study of independent/interventionist media systems. Before arriving at the Institute, Anderson spent seven years as a radio journalist and seven years reporting on the U.S. microradio movement; the latter continues at DIYmedia.net. He was instrumental in the launch of the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center's low-power FM station, WRFU and now volunteers his time with community radio station WEFT. Anderson has a master's degree in journalism and mass communication from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a bachelor's degree in broadcast journalism and humanities from Valparaiso University.

Sayuri Arai | sarai2@illinois.edu
Arai received her B.A. in English literature from Aichi Shukutoku University in Japan and her M.A. in communication from the University of New Mexico. Her master's thesis explored how Japanese sojourners in the United States, within a broad context of pro-white and anti-black ideologies, negotiate their sense of racial identity. For the paper she derived from the thesis, she earned the Top Debut Paper Award, presented by the Executives Club at the WSCA annual convention in 2006. Before entering the ICR, Sayuri worked in Tokyo for an international nongovernmental organization, IMADR, devoted to eliminating discrimination and racism worldwide. She conducted research on minority women, including the Ainu, Burakumin and Korean residents in Japan. These research experiences motivated her to continue studying intercultural communication with an emphasis on race, power and identity and to extend her interest to related areas, including postcolonialism, whiteness studies, critical cultural studies and media studies.

Jillian Baez | jbaez@illinois.edu
Baez' research interests lie in media ethnography, feminist theory and Latina/o Studies. She is especially interested in understanding how media discourses translate into everyday life, specifically in relation to gender and Latinidad. She has conducted field work in both the greater San Juan metropolitan area in Puerto Rico and in Chicago. Baez is a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Diversity Fellow and was a recipient of the University of Illinois Graduate College Fellowship, Center for Puerto Rican Studies Research (CUNY) Grant, and the Tinker Field Research Grant for Graduate Student Research in Latin America and the Caribbean at the University of Illinois, along with other honors and awards. She has presented her work at the National Communication Association, Latin American Studies Association and the International Communication Association, among others. She has forthcoming articles in the Journal of Popular Communication and Centro (Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies). Baez has a B.A. in media studies and Puerto Rican/Latino studies from Hunter College-City University of New York and is currently teaching Latina/o Media in the U.S.
Prospective dissertation title: "Between Spectacular and Ordinary Bodies: A Discourse Ethnography of the Latina Body, Citizenship, and Popular Culture"
Adviser: Angharad Valdivia

Himika Bhattacharya | hbhattac@illinois.edu
Prospective dissertation title: "Women's experiences of marriage practice, violence and healthcare in Lahaul-Spiti, India"
Adviser: Paula Treichler

Christina Ceisel | cceisel2@illinois.edu

Wenrui Chen | chenwenrui@gmail.com
Chen has her B.A. in Chinese language and literature and an M.A. in comparative literature from Sun Yat-sen University in China. Her graduate program focused on women's studies and culture theories. She also worked for several programs for gender equality and media advocacy in Guangzhou during her M.A. years, such as the Global Monitoring Project in 2005, the first performance of "Vagina Monologues" in China, and a media training program for local journalists. Then she worked as an English teacher after graduation and an editor for a Chinese newspaper in Guangzhou before she came to the ICR. She is interested in studying culture theories, media theories and the media practices in the Chinese context with gender perspectives.

Catherine Coleman | cacolema@illinois.edu
Coleman entered the Institute of Communications Research with bachelor's degrees in English and psychology with honors from the University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn. Her work experience includes conducting research for a political polling and consulting firm in Washington, D.C., working as an independent marketing consultant and as a marketing analyst for a General Electric subsidiary that was releasing an Internet content delivery network, and advertising with TMP Worldwide. Coleman's research interests include advertising ethics and ethical considerations in advertising regulation — from within the industry and by government — with special attention to how these issues relate to visual persuasion and gender.

Sara Connell | sconnell@illinois.edu
Connell is focusing her research interests on media studies, gender theory and cultural studies. She is particularly interested in women's health care and how it is portrayed in the media and in the medical field. Recently she has been studying how public health campaigns are used by the media and the effects of these campaigns on people's perception of health issues. Connell has given many conference papers and authored the "Journalism" entry in The Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women: Global Women's Issues and Knowledge (2000). Before she came to graduate school, she worked as a production editor for two publishing houses in New York City, St. Martin's Press and Oxford University Press, and she continues to do freelance work for the latter. She also worked as a media intern for ABC News "Nightline" in Washington, D.C., where she assisted correspondents, editors and producers and the 1990 Nelson Mandela Town Meeting. More recently she worked as an assistant for Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Prospective dissertation title: "Disempowering Through Definition: Nike Advertising and Constructions of Vulnerability"
Chair: Linda Scott; Adviser: Cliff Christians

Sabryna Cornish | cornish@illinois.edu
Sabryna Cornish received her B.A. in journalism and M.A. in communication from Northern Illinois University. A media specialist, her research focuses on new media studies, specifically social aspects of the Internet. Her work has been published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, and she has been interviewed about her research by several media outlets, such as Voice of America. Her current research examines the role of online advocacy groups in the democratic process and societal perceptions of the Internet, which she presented in Paris. She is an adjunct lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago, teaching courses in media studies, popular culture, and male and female communication at the undergraduate level. She is a member of the Association of Internet Researchers, the Society for Professional Journalists and the National and International Communication Associations.
Prospective dissertation title: "The Framing of the Internet by Traditional Mass Media"
Adviser: Steve Jones

Matt Crain | mattcrain1@yahoo.com
Broadly, Crain's research involves the cultural and political implications of media production technologies that blur the division between audience and author. Central to this work is the changing structure and business practices of the media industries and the governmental policy that shapes them. Matt holds a master's degree in new media studies from DePaul University and a bachelor's degree in multimedia from Bradley University. Prior to graduate study he worked in video, audio and Web production. He has presented research on video blogging at the Chicago Ethnography Conference.

Ian Davis | iandavis@illinois.edu

Theodore Davis | tdavis23@uiuc.edu

Kevin Dolan | kdolan@uiuc.edu
Dolan received a B.A. in English literature at Montana State University at Bozeman and an M.A. in American studies from the University of New Mexico. He worked as a reporter and editor at daily newspapers for 16 years, the last nine as a copy editor and designer at The Santa Fe New Mexican. His research interests include critical whiteness studies, cultural and critical studies, and race and ethnic studies, and more specifically, the way the news media protect and bolster the status quo, particularly what he calls the "incumbency of whiteness." He has presented papers at the Crossroads in Cultural Studies 2004 conference and the 2006 ICA conference in Dresden, Germany. He has an article published in Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, 6(3): 379-396, and Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Vol. 28).
Prospective dissertation title: Whiteness and News: The Interlocking Social Construction of 'Realities'"
Adviser: John Nerone

Matthew Doolittle | mdoolitt@uiuc.edu
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, Doolittle is a student in the combined M.D./Ph.D. program at the ICR and the College of Medicine. His research focuses on the relationship between the use of language and the survival of physical pain. Through an examination of medical and nonmedical sources, he is examining a broader range of language strategies than have previously been acknowledged by either medical or nonmedical researchers in this area. His work is conceptualizing not only psycho-cultural but also neurological roles for such exercises of language in the mitigation of painful experience. During his graduate program, he also has pursued several projects related to the uses of narrative in the understanding and treatment of trauma, and in 1998 he was invited by the state of Kuwait to observe the comprehensive and ongoing trauma treatment program established after the 1991 Gulf War. From 1995 to 1998, Doolittle held a University of Illinois Distinguished Fellowship in Communications Research. In 1999 he held a Bloomfield Fellowship at the College of Medicine. Recently he received the Diane Gottheil Fellowship for "an outstanding M.D./Ph.D. student entering the final year of the program."

Steven Doran | steven.edward.doran@gmail.com
Doran has research interests in communications technologies, new media, online culture and queer theory. Steven completed his B.A. in psychology at the University of Calgary in 2003 and his M.A. in humanities at York University in Toronto in 2005. His previous work looked at constructions of self in gay men's narratives of coming out. Doran recently purchased an iPhone and named it Dan; no, you can't touch it.

Alice Filmer | filmer@uiuc.edu
Filmer's research centers on a problematic she calls the acoustics of identity. When an individual's identity — cultural, national, racial, ethnic, etc. — cannot be located according to audiovisual cues subsumed within prevailing socio-cultural stereotypes, his/her speech characteristics frequently serve to identify, claim and authorize particular group memberships or affiliations. Concentrating on issues of linguistic diversity and language rights in multicultural societies such as the United States, her work examines the socio-political construction of language standards and stigmas within the historical context of Euro-American colonialism. In her research on acoustic identity, she problematizes explanations of center-periphery power relations that have become obsolete in the face of worldwide migration and other demographic shifts. More specifically, she examines liminal spaces created and taken up by individuals and communities, who linguistically negotiate identities that defy hegemonic normativity and escape the confines of essentialism. Among several research sites, Filmer has investigated a linguistic dilemma affecting many young speakers of African-American vernacular English who struggle to negotiate a black identity in the face of peer criticism for "sounding white" when they speak standard English (in World Englishes, 22(3), 2003). In her essay, "Delivering Malinche" (in Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 26, 2003), she writes about the "mexicanization" of a gringa who begins to "sound Sonoran" as she learns to speak Spanish fluently. Alice has been the recipient of a multi-year Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship to study Quechua through the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. As an undergraduate, she first studied linguistics at UC-Berkeley and Edinburgh University, and then music at UC-Riverside. Her M.A. is in speech communication from San Francisco State University.
Prospective dissertation title: "The Acoustics of Identity: Linguistic Passports Beyond Empire and Essentialism"
Chair: Norman Denzin; Adviser: Cameron McCarthy

Theodore Peter Gournelos | gournelo@uiuc.edu
Gournelos works mainly on conceptualizations of political intervention through visual culture. He has a critical background in literary theory, trauma theory, philosophy, psychology, public sphere theory and aesthetics. He recieved a B.A. in English and a B.A. in Art Studio from the University of Maryland, College Park, and completed his M.F.A. in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign in 2004. He is the recipient of three University of Illinois Brodie Grants and was a Brodie Fellow in the 2001-2002 academic year. He also received a Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship from the European Union Center at the University of Illinois for the 2005-2006 academic year for the study of French. A practicing artist, Gournelos has exhibited public sculpture and gallery-oriented work in several states and is the founder of www.akastatistic.org.

Mariana Goya Martinez | mgoyam2@uiuc.edu
Martinez has focused her research interests on the influence of new media technologies on human thinking, human behavior and socialization, as well as the ideologies behind their invention and design. Her work concentrates on the effects of hypertext on academic writing, the motivations of human emulation in artificial intelligence, and the benefits of blog writing in adolescent users. She received an M.A. in communication research from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a B.A. in communication from Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico. She is a recipient of a graduate scholarship from the Mexican Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT).

Dong Han | donghan@uiuc.edu
Han's general research interests include media commercialization, media and technology, and Chinese media studies. He received a bachelor's degree in English from Beijing Foreign Studies University and a law degree from Peking University (Beijing University). Before entering the ICR, he worked as a legal consultant for China Central Television, dealing with international legal issues and copyright management.

Amy Hasinoff | ahasino2@uiuc.edu

David Haskell | haskell2@uiuc.edu

Kevin Healey | khealey2@uiuc.edu
Healey earned an M.A. in media studies from New School University (2005) and a B.A. in sociology and women's studies from Drew University (1996). Before coming to the ICR, Healey spent six years doing Web site technical production for a variety of organizations in the New York City area, from music entertainment (Bertelsmann, MTV) to nonprofit (Fund for the City of New York, March of Dimes). His master's work focused on 9/11, the war on terrorism, the Iraq war and the Bush administration. His more recent work focuses on media and religious identity in American culture, with a particular concern for the media strategies of progressive religious organizations. Healey also is an amateur singer/songwriter with an interest in the relationship between music and social change (especially jazz and protest music). He keeps a blog and an archive of his writing and songs at www.khealey.com.

Yu Hong | yuhong@uiuc.edu
Prospective dissertation title: "Class Formation in High-Tech Information and Communications as an Aspect of China's Reintegration Into Transnational Capitalism"
Adviser: Dan Schiller

Kathy Petitte Jamison | kjamison@uis.edu
Jamison entered the Institute of Communications Research in 2002 and took a position as assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield in 2005. Her dissertation topic proposes an ethic in communication by applying it to advertising/consumer culture. Jamison is the UIS Visiting Scholar to China in 2008 and has delivered papers at conferences in Durbin, South Africa, in 2006; and Angouleme, France, in 2004. In 2003-2004, she taught business communication and English as a second language at the University of Poitiers, France. Her teaching and research interests include communication ethics, consumer culture, children and advertising, film and culture, research methods and media writing. She is an award-winning journalist and a fine art photographer.

Camille Johnson-Yale | ckjohnsn@uiuc.edu
Johnson-Yale received her B.S. in telecommunications from Ohio University and an M.A. in communication from the University of Illinois at Chicago. With more than a decade's experience working in commercial radio, television and film production, her research interests include media industries, new media technologies, theories of space and cultural production, and mediated discourses of globalization. Her publications include a forthcoming article in the Journal of Popular Culture titled, "West by Northwest: The politics of place in Ang Lee's 'Brokeback Mountain,' " as well as a co-authored chapter with Andrea Press in P. Goldstein & J. Machor's forthcoming collection, "American Reception Study" (Oxford University Press). Johnson-Yale was named one of the New Voices in Critical and Cultural Studies by the National Communication Association in 2006.
Prospective dissertation title: "'Runaway Film Production': The Discursive Construction of Spaces of Cultural Production by the U.S. Film Industry, 1949-2007"
Adviser: John Nerone

Andrew Kennis | akennis2@uiuc.edu
Kennis holds an M.A. degree in political science, with a specialization in comparative politics. His dissertation focuses on applying the propaganda and indexing models toward coverage of the Iraq war, immigration into the U.S., and oppositional social movements to official U.S. policy. As a research assistant, he has been investigating open standards policy adoption and their societal impact. Besides having taught as an adjunct professor in Mexico City, San Francisco and New York, Kennis also worked as a freelance investigative journalist reporting from a variety of locations including Venezuela, Chiapas, Guatemala, Quebec, Palestine, Israel and Taiwan. Most recently, Kennis reported from Venezuela, where he traveled to five cities and interviewed dozens of people about how the political changes in Venezuela have impacted their lives.

Owen Kulemeka | okuleme2@uiuc.edu
Kulemeka received a B.A. in English and an M.A. in communication, both from the University of Maryland. His work experience includes public relations and marketing positions at US Airways, Amnesty International, the American Insurance Association, the United Nations, the O.E.C.D, Cassidy & Associates/Weber Shandwick Government Relations, and Kearney & Company. His research interests include the role of public relations and advertising in helping communities recover after a disaster. Owen's Web site can be found at www.recoverystr.org.

Wanju (Alice) Liao | wliao3@uiuc.edu
Liao earned her bachelor's degree in English from National Taiwan University and her master's in Film Studies from Boston University. Her coursework at Boston University placed an emphasis on the relationship between film and society. Her status as a Taiwan national who has been educated in the West puts her in a privileged position from which to relate the history of Taiwanese cinema to Western/American and Asian discourses. From her new global perspective, this position enables her to recontextualize the Chinese cinema with which she grew up. She is focused on questions concerning how the theory and the object mutually transform one another and how cinematic studies of Chinese culture may contribute to contemporary Western views on the subject of film/media and the society. She will make inquiries on subjects such as film and media theory in modern Western society, comparative cultural codes in modern Western and Chinese context, cinematic representation of culture with gender and queer discourses, and how studies on Chinese cinema may help transcend current film ad media theories. Her academic interests also include film theory, auteurism, independent film, gender and sexuality studies.

Shoshana Magnet | magnet@uiuc.edu
Magnet is aSSHRC doctoral fellow in the ICR. She received her undergraduate degree from McMaster University in arts and science and her master's degree from the University of Toronto in sociology and equity studies. Her video, "Genetic," was funded by a fellowship from Toronto's Inside Out Film and Video Festival and has screened at festivals in New York, Toronto, and the Czech Republic. Her published work has appeared in New Media & Society, Qualitative Inquiry, Atlantis and Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme. Her Web site can be found at www.magnetopia.org.
Prospective dissertation title: "Encoding the Body: Critically Assessing the Collection and Uses of Biometric Information"
Advisers: Paula Treichler and Kent Ono

Sascha Meinrath | sascha@ucimc.org
Meinrath is a Telecommunications Fellow in the ICR, where he is finishing his Ph.D. on community empowerment and the impacts and interactions of participatory media, wireless communication, and emergent technologies. He has been described as a "community Internet pioneer" and an "entrepreneurial visionary" and is a well-known expert on community wireless networks and municipal broadband. Leading news sources, including the Economist, the New York Times, the Nation, and National Public Radio, often cite Meinrath's work in covering issues related to CWNs. Meinrath is the research director for the New America Foundation's Wireless Future Program. He also coordinates the Open Source Wireless Coalition, a global partnership of open source wireless integrators, researchers, implementors and companies dedicated to the development of open source, interoperable, low-cost wireless technologies. He is a regular contributor to MuniWireless.com, the leading source for municipal wireless news and information, and a regular contributor to Government Technology's Digital Communities, the online portal and comprehensive information resource for the public sector. He also has worked with Free Press, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, the Acorn Active Media Foundation, the Ethos Group and the CUWiN Foundation. He holds a bachelor's degree from Yale University and a master's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, both in psychology.

Robert Mejia | robmej127@yahoo.com
Mejia's research interests are eclectic, but he says he'd like to believe they are grounded in a philosophy of liberation. Understandably, this "liberatory practice" is not transcendental by any means, and if unchecked, contains the potential to become as destructive as other so-called "freedom" movements (i.e., benevolent patriarchy, Operation Iraqi Freedom, etc.). As such, he is extremely indebted to those who ground him when his post-modern mind disappears into the clouds; additionally, he is grateful to Aunnie, his partner, and others who often are a source of inspiration for the work that he does.

Aisha Talé Mitchell | amitche4@uiuc.edu
Mitchell earned a B.F.A. in visual communications (magna cum laude) and an M.S. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in advertising. Her work experience includes more than 10 years in visual arts and graphic design. Her research interests include media studies as it relates to advertising and consumer behavior in connection with persuasion and influence on race, body image, product placement and purchases.

Ellen Elizabeth Moore | emoo@uiuc.edu
Moore received her B.A. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in physical anthropology, with a focus in human osteology. She continued her education with a master's degree in forensic anthropology and advanced human osteology from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, one of the first centers for modern forensic anthropology in the country. She conducted archaeological investigations of Native American sites in northern California before taking a job with the U.S. Department of Defense at Hickam Air Force Base in Oahu, Hawaii, from 2000-2003. The position involved traveling to countries in Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand), conducting archaeological investigations to recover the remains of U.S. service members who did not return from the Vietnam conflict, and conducting osteological analyses back in the lab to identify the remains for family members. Moore has been a graduate student and research assistant in the ICR since 2003. Her dissertation focus is religion and media, specifically, how churches use secular media and popular culture and what impact this has on religious practices and identity.

Molly Niesen | mniesen@uiuc.edu

Andrew O Baoill
Prospective dissertation title: "Impact of Podcasting on Community Radio"
Adviser: John Nerone

Sangdo Oh | sangoh@uiuc.edu

Jin Kyung Park | jkpark1@uiuc.edu
Park received a B.A. in public administration at Sookmyung Women's University in Seoul, Korea, and an M.A in kinesiology with a concentration on cultural studies of sport and body studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the Institute, Park is focusing on cultural studies and postcolonial studies. She is also pursuing a doctoral minor in the Gender and Women's Studies Program. Upon completing her field research in both Korea and Japan, she is currently writing her dissertation, which examines a cultural history of gynecological diseases in Japanese-dominated Korea. Her dissertation research has been supported by Gender and Women's Studies, International Studies and the Graduate College at Illinois, the Association for Asian Studies, and the College Women's Association of Japan. Park is the recipient of the Top Student Paper Award in the Feminist Scholarship Division at the 2002 annual conference of International Communication Association. Her publications include "Governing Doped Bodies: The World Anti-Doping Agency and the Global Culture of Surveillance," Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 5(2), 174-188, and "Contesting Culture: Identity and Curriculum Dilemmas in the Age of Globalization, Postcolonialism, and Multiplicity" (with Cameron McCarthy, Michael Giardina and Susan Harewood), Harvard Education Review 73 (3): 449-465.
Prospective dissertation title: "Governing Korean Women's Bodies: Japanese Colonialism, Maternal Health and Mass Media in Colonial Korea, 1920-1945"
Adviser: Paula Treichler

Elizabeth Perea | perea@uiuc.edu
Perea's research interests include cultural studies and feminist & postmodern theory. Her primary focus is on popular music production and consumption behaviors as they relate to translocal community formation and socio-political engagement practices that transcend traditional geographic boundaries. She is particularly interested in the socio/cultural cultivation of art, political discourse, and practices of social justice from an American communication/cultural studies perspective. Her research in the area of popular music has resulted in an article in Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 27, titled "Music, Meaning, and Subjectivity: The 32 Flavors of Ani DiFranco and Friends." She is also the co-author of "From the Playboy to the Hustler: Class, Race, and the Marketing of Masculinity," a chapter in the Blackwell Media Studies Reader edited by Angharad Valdivia. Perea is currently working on her dissertation, "Looking for a Righteous Babe: Alternative Musical Communities and the Aesthetics of Commerce, Politics, and Art." Her article, "Binaries & Bitches: Sexual Identity, Performance, and Gender Practices of the Self — A Politics of Personal and Social Transformation," is currently under consideration for inclusion in an anthology on sexual identities, communication and performance to be published by Sage Publications. She has served as a reviewer for Cultural Studies and Critical Methodologies, Qualitative Inquiry, and Interfacings: A Journal of Contemporary Media Studies and currently sits on the editorial board of Kaleidoscope: A Graduate Journal of Qualitative Communication Research edited by Cathy B. Glenn of Southern Illinois University. Perea received her B.A. in communication from Boise State University in Boise, Idaho. She received her master's in speech communication from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is completing her Ph.D. in cultural studies and communication at the Institute of Communications Research.
Prospective dissertation title: "How Do You Define Success? Business, Community, and Music at Righteous Babe Records"
Adviser: Cameron McCarthy

Victor Pickard | vpickard@uiuc.edu
After teaching and traveling for five years across parts of Asia, Europe and South America, Pickard returned to the United States to merge academic and activist interests. He holds an M.A. in communications from the University of Washington, where he conducted research for the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement and wrote his master's thesis on and volunteered for the Seattle Independent Media Center. His current research explores how media politics, history and democratic theory intersect with communications policy. His work has been published in a number of academic journals, including the Journal of Communication; Global Media and Communication; Media, Culture & Society; New Media and Society; Journal of Communication Inquiry; International Journal of Communication Law and Policy; and Critical Studies in Media Communication. He spent the summer of 2005 working on media policy in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Telecommunications Policy Fellow for Rep. Diane Watson. Currently he is writing a dissertation that explores the origins of the social contract between U.S. media institutions and the public that emerged from 1940s media policy debates and initiatives such as the Hutchins Commission, the FCC Blue Book and the Fairness Doctrine. A more detailed account of his research and teaching can be found on his Web site: www.victorpickard.com
Prospective dissertation title: "Media Democracy Deferred: Critical Junctures in U.S. Communications Policy, 1945-1949"
Adviser: Robert McChesney

Veronica Pomata | vpomata2@uiuc.edu

Richard Potter | rpotter2@uiuc.edu

Roswell Quinn | rquinn1@uiuc.edu
Prospective dissertation title: "Broader Spectrum: A History of Antibiotic Research and Development"
Adviser: Paula Treichler

Maritza Quinones-Rivera | qunnsrvr@uiuc.edu
Quinones-Rivera's research interests are in media representations of otherness in mainstream media and popular culture; media roles on diasporic cultures in the U.S., Latin America, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean; popular culture; ethnic identities; and gender. Quinones-Rivera is a recipient of the University of Illinois Summer Predoctoral Program (2003) and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (2004/2005). Before coming to Illinois, she held a professional position as communications manager (1999-2003) for the Office of the Vice President for Student Development and Diversity at Indiana University. In addition, she held the position of assistant executive director (1994-1999) for a historical African-American organization of nine fraternities and sororities, the National Pan-Hellenic Council, Inc., also at Indiana University. Currently she is a board member for the alumni association at Indiana University's School of Library and Information Science (2002-present). She is also a student member of the National Communication Association, the Afro-Latin/American Research Association, the Latin American Studies Association and the Cultural Studies Association.

Claudia Quintero Ulloa | uquinter@uiuc.edu
Born in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico, Quintero-Ulloa earned a bachelor's degree in communication from the Universidad del Valle de Atemajac (1993). In 1994, she studied for a master's degree in Hispanic letters with a major in socio-critics at the Universite Paul Valery in Montpellier, France. In 2003 she obtained a master's degree in sciences with a major in communication from the Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey, at the Monterrey, Mexico, campus. From 1996 to 2003, she taught several undergraduate courses at the Guadalajara, Mexico, campus of ITESM. In the field of communication research, she started studying the telenovela in 1998 using a content analysis approach. In her master's thesis, she examined the telenovela's narrative structure following Vladimir Propp's analysis of the fairytale's character functions. She has presented several conference papers on the topic of the telenovela. She worked as researcher and fieldwork coordinator in the study, "Television and Everyday Life in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey," sponsored by Televisa, and part of her research included audience analysis. She is the recipient of a scholarship for doctoral study in the United States from the National Council of Science and Technology (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia, CONACYT), a Mexican governmental institution. In Summer 2004, she was the recipient of a Tinker field research grant for graduate student research in Latin America and Iberia. Her research interests include media and cultural studies, with an analytical framework grounded in folklore, history and anthropology.

Carolyn Randolph | crandol2@uiuc.edu

Sarah Rasmusson | srasmus3@uiuc.edu
Rasmusson is a visiting assistant professor of Women's and Gender Studies at The College of New Jersey. Formerly a beat reporter in New York City for the alternative press such as The Freedom Forum/First Amendment Center, Women's E-News, the Amsterdam News and The Blade, she has written articles for a number of publications including Bitch, The Village Voice, Women's Review of Books and The New York Times. She recently contributed to an anthology on abortion politics, "No Easy Choice" (Rutgers, 2008) and to the Encyclopedia of Girls Culture (Greenwood, 2008). She holds degrees from Boston University and New York University and has also studied at Harvard University, Oxford Universit, and Charles University in Prague. Her research interests include new cultural feminisms and gendered-critical whiteness studies.

Dennis Redmond | redmond2@uiuc.edu

Michelle Rivera | mmrivera@uiuc.edu

Celiany Rivera Velazquez | ycrivera@uiuc.edu
An art and media events producer, Rivera Velazquez came to the ICR with a B.A. in mass communications from the University of Puerto Rico. Combining her research interests in cinema and queer studies, she completed an honors thesis titled, "Those dammed/gorgeous drags: a new discussion of transgenders in contemporary cinema." While living in Puerto Rico, she produced the renowned art expositions, Universal Publics in Search of Sensorial Interventions (P.U.B.I.S., Spanish acronym) and worked as the assistant producer of the documentary film, "KZ," a piece that narrates the experiences of the Puerto Rican veterans in the Vietnam War. She also worked at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control in Georgia, while completing an internship with the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities. She is also an alumna of the University of Illinois-sponsored Summer Research Opportunity Program (2001) and the Summer Predoctoral Institute (2002). Her current research advocates for constructive media inclusivity of a wide spectrum of GLBT identities. For her dissertation project, she is seeking to create a visual multimedia piece in which queer voices can find a space to respond and demystify their existent media representations.
Prospective dissertation title: "Embodying Multimedia: Cuban Las Krudas, Feminist Cultural Resistance, and Spanish Caribbean Practices of Sight and Sound"
Adviser: Norman Denzin

James Salvo

Maria Isabel Silva | mi-silva@uiuc.edu

Rob Sloane | rsloane@uiuc.edu
After receiving a B.A. in English literature, Sloane went to work for a small documentary film production company in Washington, D.C. Over the course of two years there, he held a number of different positions, including production assistant, associate producer and researcher/writer and ultimately garnered credits on three films (related to Edgar Allan Poe, the Fourth Amendment, and the National Cathedral) that aired nationally on PBS. When he returned to graduate school, he pursued his interests in the study and analysis of popular culture, earning an M.A. in American culture studies and writing a thesis on popular music. Currently he is writing his dissertation on the economics and culture of an independent record store. He has published two articles in book anthologies about television and media studies. His research interests include popular music, cultural/media studies, aesthetics and taste, and the relationship between mass media and democracy.
Prospective dissertation title: "Accounting and Taste: Economics and Culture in an Independent Record Store"
Adviser: Cameron McCarthy

Katherine Sredl | sredl@illinois.edu
My dissertation, "The Construct of Consumer Pride and Its Relevance to Family Consumption: A Field Study in a Transformation Economy," develops a construct of pride that considers how pride is socially and symbolically elicited, communicated, and experienced at the individual, group, and social levels through sustained rituals and the use of possessions, rather than viewing pride as solely an individual or psychobiological experience. Specifically, I observe how pride is elicited in the consumption-based family ritual of Sunday lunch in Zagreb, Croatia. Sunday lunch–a ritual in Zagreb through pre-socialist, socialist, and post-socialist eras, in which multiple generations are present and special tableware possessions are used–is a rich context in which to examine the intersection of emotions, rituals, possessions, and macro-level change. My dissertation contributes to the interpretive advertising and consumer behavior literature on possessions by examining how consumers experience emotions related to tableware. I explore how display of tableware in "ritual downtime," or the time between rituals, elicits reflection on emotions related to possessions and ritual. My dissertation also extends work on ritual by arguing emotion and ritual serve as links between the self, the group, and macro-level changes of globalization. Her dissertation abstract is available at Katherine_Sredl_ Dissertation_ Abstract.doc and her CV is at Katherine_Sredl_CV_Sept_2008.pdf.
Prospective dissertation title: "The Construct of Consumer Pride and Its Relevance to Intergenerational Consumption: A Field Study in a Transformation Economy."
Adviser: Cele C. Otnes, Michelle R. Nelson

Melba Velez | gmelba@gmail.com
Velez earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in rhetorical studies from Purdue University and is interested in communication ethics and environmental communication in the United States and the Caribbean. She also continues to research and publish in the areas of Latin-American/Caribbean/Latina-o philosophy and intellectual history. Her dissertation considers the various ways in which conservation's long-term success depends upon fundamental shifts in cultural values, in aesthetic and moral communication, and in shared understandings of how the individual human fits into social and ecological communities. She has taught courses in advanced research writing, fundamentals of speech communication, Spanish level II, oral and written communication I & II, and popular culture. She currently serves as student representative for the National Communication Association Environmental Communication Division.

Gerardo Villalabos Romo/ | rvillalo@uiuc.edu

Myra Washington | mwashin4@uiuc.edu

Li Xiong | lixiong2@uiuc.edu

J. Jenny Yang | jyang36@uiuc.edu
Yang is doing research on international advertising, pharmaceutical marketing, Internet marketing and media management. Her papers were presented at the annual conferences of the International Communication Association and the American Academy of Advertising. She received her master's degree in mass communications from Kansas State University, where she also taught classes in electronic media. Her undergraduate major was in pharmaceutical science, and she worked for four years as a news anchorwoman and master of ceremony in China.

Desiree Yomtoob | yomtoob@uiuc.edu
Yomtoob's area of research involves the development of a qualitiative movement methodology that works to reconfigure the social disciplining of the body. Currently she is formulating an aesthetic direction for her multimedia work, which allows for ways of being through performance, other than those established in these neo-colonial globalized times. Her area of interest is transnational culture, cultural resistance and the artistic and musical projects of the Persian Diaspora. She works extensively with somatics practices, including Alexander Technique, Hakomi and Bartenieff Fundamentals. Her desire as she continues her research is to formulate communications/cultural studies theory, which explains the meaning making process of the body in relationship and communication and as culture. Ideas of love and compassion are key in her work as she seeks to understand the technology of presence in resistent practices in the modern and post-modern discursive fields. Yomtoob has been a multimedia artist and vocalist for many years. Before entering graduate school she formulated a method for language teaching based in performance, which she taught in the ESL context. She has worked as the assistant program director for a university-based social issues theatre program. She also served as creative consultant for the independent film, "Highlife," which should be hitting the large screen anytime now. Her work has been published in Studies in Symbolic Interaction.

Ying Zhangg | eclarezhang@gmail.com
Zhang's research interests include media and democracy, and Chinese media history. She received a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Qingdao University, and a master's degree in communication studies from Peking University. She worked as a news editor for China Central Television (First Channel) for two years and as a journalist and an anchor person for local televisions in China for another two years.

Yuanzhi Alex Zhou | yzhou@uiuc.edu