Mal Ahern(Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Washington) is a historian of media technology and visual culture. Her research describes the techniques and technologies that produce and circulate images on a mass scale. Her book-in-progress, Factory Forms, describes the skilled labor required to reproduce images in commercial film laboratories, printing pressrooms, projection booths, and television broadcast engineering. The automation of these industries, she argues, lay the groundwork for the transition from analog to digital mass media. By recognizing human labor as an essential aspect of media infrastructure, her research aims to connect current research on media materiality with both a close attention to aesthetics and a historical materialism attentive to economic and political conflict.
Her published essays on topics such as printer's errors, mechanical drawing,air conditioning, grids, Andy Warhol, and other topics have appeared in journals such as diacritics, Discourse, NECSUS, World Picture, and The New Inquiry. Her essay “Cinema’s Automatisms and Industrial Automation” won the Annette Kuhn Debut Essay Prize from Screen for the best first peer-reviewed essay in any academic journal. She is also in the process of publishing a series of essays on air conditioning as a media infrastructure, most recently the first of a two-part essay on climate and sustainable conservation practice in the e-flux architecture project After Comfort: A User's Guide.
Prior to entering academia, Ahern was a collections worker at Museum of the Moving Image in New York, where she contributed to the cataloging and management of a collection comprising over 120,000 objects related to the history of film, TV, and digital media. She earned a PhD in Film and Media Studies and History of Art at Yale University, and has taught at Yale and Bard College. She was a 2023-24 fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and a current Signature Course Fellow at the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, where she will be developing an interdisciplinary course on glitches, errors, and other failures of technology. She also teaches courses on media labor, the history of media technology, and feminist media studies.
Roundtable Participants
Nitin Govil is Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. His research and teaching focuses on comparative cultural politics with an emphasis on transnational media industries. He is the author of Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay and one of the coauthors of Global Hollywood and Global Hollywood 2. He is currently working on a new book on transnational media during the Cold War titled Out of Alignment.
Kara Keeling is Professor and Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Keeling is author of Queer Times, Black Futures (New York University Press, 2019) and The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007) and coeditor (with Josh Kun) of a selection of writings about sound and American Studies entitled Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), and (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead entitled European Pedigrees/African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Shannon Mattern is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Director of Creative Research and Practice at the Metropolitan NY Library Council. From 2004 to 2022, she served in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. Her writing and teaching focus on media architectures and information infrastructures. She has written books about libraries, maps, and urban intelligence; and she contributes a column about urban data and mediated spaces to Places Journal. She’ll be the 2025 Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.
Thomas Patrick Pringleis Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. With Gertrud Koch and Bernard Stiegler, he is the co-author of Machine (2019). Pringle’s articles addressing environmental media appear in the journals NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Journal of Film and Video, Heliotrope, and New Media & Society, among others. His current book manuscript, The Climate Proxy, addresses conjoint theoretical concerns across media historiography and the visual documentation of climate crises.
Nicole Starosielski, Professor of Film and Media at the University of California-Berkeley, conducts research on global internet and media distribution, communications infrastructures ranging from data centers to undersea cables, and media’s environmental and elemental dimensions. Starosielski is author or co-editor of over thirty articles and five books on media, infrastructure, and environments, including: The Undersea Network (2015), Media Hot and Cold (2021), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (2015), Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (2016), Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media (2021), as well as co-editor of the “Elements” book series at Duke University Press.
Starosielski's most recent project, Sustainable Subsea Networks (https://www.sustainablesubseanetworks.com/), works to enhance the sustainability of subsea cable infrastructures.
Panelists
Josh Baldelomaris a 1st year PhD student in the Film and Media Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara. His research interests include histories of scientific imaging, experimental and nontheatrical film, critical theory, and animal studies.
Prior to graduate school, Josh worked at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. At the library, he taught teenagers how to make music on digital audio programs. He holds a BA in Rhetoric from the University of Pittsburgh. He also enjoys making music and writing fiction.
Alexandra Bliziotisis a master’s student in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her research interests exist at the intersection of politics, communication technologies, and computational aesthetics. Her writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Nam Do(they/them) is a second-year PhD student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture (CSLC) at the University of Southern California. They are interested in Black studies, revolutionary film and music, political economy, urban spatial politics, and critical studies of religion and secularism.
Samuel Fox(He/Him) is currently an Architecture (History & Theory) Ph.D. Student at Columbia University. He studies the architecture and media of inter- and post-war Europe and contemporary perceptions of its remnants, particularly in the U.K. and Italy. He is especially interested in planned towns/cities, modernism’s approximations of “utopia,” and architecture’s role in forming or (re)producing socio-political stances. Samuel was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, and moved to the USA at 17 to study for his A.B. in History of Art and Architecture at Dartmouth College as a Fulbright-Sutton Trust Scholar. Samuel also holds an M.Phil in Social (Political and Economic) Anthropology from the University of Cambridge where, as a Cambridge Trust and Baillie Gifford Scholar, he researched the European Union’s involvement in efforts to forestall Italian neofascism by memorializing and preserving surviving fascist-era architecture.
Riley Goldis a Ph.D. student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. He researches histories and theories of automation as they relate to media and environments. He holds a research M.A. in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam.
Eugene Huis a second-year Master’s student at the University of Southern California’s Cinema and Media Studies program. His research interests lie mostly in American film history, animation, comedy, and star studies. While he had a slightly different repertoire of interests during his undergrad at NYU when he undertook research pertaining to Park Chan-Wook’s vengeance trilogy as well as Homeric and Vergilian epics, his most extensive research projects at USC revolve around American animation staples such as The Simpsons, the Goofy Sports series, and the Bosko shorts, with a particular focus on animation as meta-commentary and the real life stardom of cartoon protagonists. He has also started a series of video essays on animators throughout history, with the first episodes being about Lotte Reiniger and the Brumberg sisters respectively. He spends his days off honing his card magic and voice acting. In regards to the latter, he has created a video series called Lyric Legionnaire where each episode is a video game montage with commentary done exclusively in rhyme and in the voice of popular fictional characters.
Sasha Karsavinais a PhD student at Yale University, where she studies science fiction through a comparative lens. Her writings and translations have been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, Isolarii, The New Inquiry, PEN America, and Columbia Journal.
Haiying Liis a second-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include Asian and Asian American literature, media philosophies, feminism and queer critique. More recently, her research has focused on a convergence zone to call into question the “free flow” of information and commodities in post-Cold War period. Haiying received her B.A. in English at Fudan University and her M.A. in Comparative Literature and World Literature at Peking University.
Yifei Li is a MA student in Cinema and Media Studies at USC. Her major research interests center on (post)-socialist media, with a particular focus on post-1977 China. Yifei investigates various media materials within post-socialist societies, aiming to understand their socio-cultural implications and how nostalgia and memories are represented and constructed. She is also dedicated to combining her media studies research with critical geography, exploring the interplay between media representation, spatial dynamics, and collective memory.
Hugo Ljungbäck is a Swedish artist, curator, and scholar. His work examines the intersections of experimental film and video, media archaeology, and archival studies, and investigates the materiality of the moving image and its processes of mediation. His award-winning videos interrogate queer history, representation, identity, and sexuality through an autobiographical lens, and have screened at film festivals, art galleries, and museums internationally. He is a PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.
Tianren Luo is currently a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Brown University, where he explores the intersection of technologies, late capitalism, and world literature. His research interests include global speculative fiction (with a specific focus on Asian and African sci-fi), critical finance studies, media theory, critical infrastructure studies. In his future project, he plans to probe into the aesthetics of the planetary computational infrastructure of financial capitalism, particularly focusing on how it subliminally reshapes our modes of perception. Beyond academia, he is also an activist and artist. He is collaborating with a team of artists and data scientists in Shanghai on a transmedia art project that investigates the use of data visualization techniques in the stock market.
Zach McLaneis a poet and PhD student in the Film and Media Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara. His research interests include: race and its relation to aesthetics and power, environmental media studies, and experimental media practices. He holds a BA in Narrative Studies from the University of Southern California, where he studied narrative form and visual culture.
Max Oginzis a PhD student in UC Santa Cruz’s Film and Digital Media program. He is a graduate of Concordia University’s Creative Writing program and was a Marcus graduate fellow in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University, where he earned his MA. His writing and films interrogate the literary, ecological, and cinematic implications of digitally mediated life. His work has been published in Sleepingfish, Fanzine, Cinemedia, Senses of Cinema, DiSCo Journal, and is forthcoming in the edited volume, Future Spaces of Power: The Cultural Politics of Digital and Outer Spaces.
Henry Neim Osman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He works across digital media, science and technology studies, and philosophy of technology. His dissertation, “Pure Hardware: Computing Life on the Analog Circuit,” historicizes the recent resurgence of analog computing and its constituent biological analogies and critiques how life is reconceptualized by these new computers at the limits of the digital.
Nayla Ramalho is a PhD candidate at USC in the Department of Comparative Literature. Her undergraduate and master's studies focused on the draft scripts of Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha, emphasizing the artistic and philosophical concepts that emanate from his work. Currently, her doctoral research centers on indigenous visual arts and cinema in Brazil and Latin America, investigating how these productions destabilize conventional notions of image-making and, consequently, the concept of the image itself.
Waris Sandhuis a 2nd year MA student at the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Waris’s research attempts to cast a wide net across several media forms, examining the cultural relationships between a variety of emerging and traditional media. This includes, but is not limited to social media, film, fashion, and gaming. By examining the intermedia relations between these forms, they look to understand how stable environments are redefined and agitated in contemporary contexts and the ways in which disparate media formations inform one another. Waris completed their BA in Media Arts with a Minor in English at the University of North Texas, where they developed a vested interest in film, namely in postcolonial cinemas, diasporic filmmaking, and masculine gender constructions in media.
Janine Sun (she/they) is a 2nd-year MA student in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Southern California. She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies Modified with Film and Media Studies from Dartmouth College. A language enthusiast, Janine continued her studies of Korean at Seoul National University from 2021-2022 and Japanese at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies from 2022-2023 as a Blakemore Freeman Fellow. Her research interests lie in contemporary East Asian film and media, notions of precarity, decay, circulation, and translation, and conceptions of the auteur in localized contexts. Outside of academics, Janine enjoys traveling and indulging her foodie impulses at restaurants across LA.
Suiyi Tang:My work considers the aesthetic knowledges of post-1945 Asian American women artists, working explicitly or implicitly with/against the terms of US imperial warfare and democratization. I argue that Asian American feminist aesthetics—spanning sculptural weaving, camouflage, and landscape painting—mediate debates around flesh and materiality, abstraction and computation, contributing to distinctive notions of the racialized human body at historic moments when the integrity of the biological organism and human personhood were being radically revised by the industrial technologies of US militarism. Elsewhere I write fiction; my work has been recognized by Best American Short Stories, Best of the Net, Black Warrior Review, and Fiction Collective 2.
Amaru Tejeda is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research areas include Latinx media, environmental media, and critical infrastructure studies, with a focus on issues of environmental injustice and their media entanglements. His dissertation examines the relationship between media, energy, and culture, with a particular focus on the history of battery technology and mobile media, tracing the battery’s role in shaping cultures of mobility from the early twentieth century into the age of lithium. Amaru is an instructor at Loyola Marymount University, where he teaches courses on film history, social media, and the art of music video. He is also a member of the Media Fields Journal Editorial Collective, and the co-editor Media Fields Journal 16, Life Cycles.
Hui Wongis an MA Communication Studies student at McGill University in Montreal. Hui’s thesis research stages an encounter between the infrastructural turn in media studies (and the humanities more broadly), the divided or split subject, and the affectively “base” infrastructural object. These readings are grounded in public art and infrastructure in Singapore. Hui's research questions broadly focus on the environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, and the work of Georges Bataille.
qingyang “karl” zong is an artist, designer and researcher based in Los Angeles. With formal and practical training in architecture, he seeks to bring intersectionality into mediating the possible futures of space, invoking poetic sensibilities obscured in the hyper-technological milieu.
zong’s creative practice is informed by a parallel of technical, historical and cultural analysis, synthesizing alternative knowledge from disparate sources. He addresses the spatial and the corporeal with experimental scenarios primarily in the form of audiovisual installations, supplemented by images, objects, and texts. In his projects, the invisible layers of reality are foregrounded, portrayed as components of an infra-world.
zong is a recent graduate from the Master of Architecture program at SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture). He is the co-founder of media collaborative technobodies. His work has been exhibited in both Los Angeles and New York.
Respondents
Jennifer Hessleris an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. Her book Surveilling the Viewer: Audience Measurement Technologies from Audimeter to Big Data is under contract with MIT Press. Her research appears in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Television & New Media, The Velvet Light Trap, Participations: Journal of Audience Reception Research, and elsewhere.
Burç Köstem is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities program. His research is situated at the intersection of cultural studies, political ecology, and media studies. He is interested in affect, infrastructure, waste, value, green transition, and eco-Marxist thought. Burç’s work has appeared in Cultural Studies, Theory, Culture & Society, Cultural Politics and Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy.
Tara McPhersonis HMH Foundation Endowed Professor in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts +Director of the Harman Academy for Polymathic Study. She is author of Feminist in a SoftwareLab (Harvard 2018) and Reconstructing Dixie (Duke 2003), and editor or co-editor of severalworks. She has received funding from the Mellon, Ford, Annenberg, and MacArthurFoundations, as well as from the NEH. She currently leads the Mellon-funded Reclaim Project,studying hate online and making anti-fascist media. The co-authored book Data Fluencies will be out in 2025.
Akira Mizuta Lippitis Vice Dean of Faculty in the School of Cinematic Arts, and Professor in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies. He is also Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures in the USC Dornsife College. His interests are in world cinemas, critical theory, Japanese film and culture, experimental film and video, and visual studies. Lippit’s published work reflects these areas and includes four books, Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (2012); Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005); Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000); and his most recent book, Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida's Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (2016). At present, Lippit is completing a book on contemporary Japanese cinema, which explores the physical and metaphysical dimensions of the "world," and another on David Lynch’s baroque alphabetics.
Allison R. G. Ross is the Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Cinema and Media Studies Division of the School of Cinematic Arts at USC. Ross received her Ph.D. from University of Southern California, with a dissertation titled A Poke in the Gnosis - Reimagining Documentary: A Phenomenological Analysis of The Reappropriation of Meaning and The Politics of Disruption. Ross researches transnational, feminist and LGBTQIA+ documentary, as well as avant garde cinema, games, and new media through intersecting lenses of (dis)ability studies, queer theory, phenomenology, narrative and documentary studies. Her work has been published in Docalogue (August 2018), Media Fields (Spring 2019) and Spectator (Spring 2019) and presented at conferences including SCMS 2015- 2019 and Visible Evidence 2015-2019 and 2023. Ross’ primary interest lies in exploring open-ended and reoriented viewing practices that challenge the ideological underpinnings of truth claims and the narratives which tend to be passively accepted as normative.