Graduate Student, Comparative Literature, UCLA
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A former computer applications developer, Barbara Hui is at present a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at UCLA. Her dissertation looks at the complex global networks at play in the historical fiction of a handful of twentieth-century German-language authors. Methodologically, she utilizes traditional close-reading techniques alongside a new media mapping tool of her own design to examine these texts. While at UCLA she has worked as programmer and literary specialist on several digital humanities projects. She has also presented widely on literature and media at both academic and technical conferences.

Graduate Student, Rhetoric Department, UC Berkeley

Paul Nadal is a doctoral student in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley working on Asia-Pacific cultural studies, literature, and film. Paul holds a B.A. in English and Ethnic Studies from the University of Washington, an M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA, and has studied at the University of the Philippines and Duke University’s Literature Program. One of his current projects includes research on queer aesthetics within the digital filmmaking movement in contemporary Philippine cinema, which is part of his broader concerns around sexuality, postcoloniality, and globalization

Graduate Student, English Department, UCLA

Renee Hudson received her BA in English at Stanford University and is currently a PhD student in English at UCLA. She specializes in twentieth century American literature. Her research interests include media theory, terrorism, and political violence.

Graduate Student, English Dept., UC Davis
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Seth Forrest is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis where he teaches courses in literature and composition. His research interests cover: poetry and poetics from the British Romantics to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers; sound studies; modern and contemporary music; and media-assisted pedagogy. Seth’s dissertation engages new theories and methodologies of prosody by analyzing the poetry of Black Mountain writers Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Paul Blackburn and Larry Eigner. To that end, his dissertation considers tape recordings, especially the collections of UCSD’s Archive for New Poetry and the PennSound archives, as primary audiotexts. The project locates the Black Mountain School in a crucial moment in the history of sound and in the history of sound technology. It explores the distinction between orality and aurality and theorizes new approaches to “old media” such as typewriters, portable tape recorders and mimeography and the role of technologies on poetic style. He is also working on a series of essays on recorded poetry, acousmatics and the notion of “secondary orality”.

Seth has taught numerous courses for the Department of English, from lower-division and advanced composition to a seminar on sound in American poetry. His courses frequently experiment with new media tools such as hypertext, collaborative wiki assignments and podcasts along with good old fashioned close reading.

Seth also writes poetry and makes sound collages from samples and field recordings. He is an active volunteer at KDVS, the freeform community radio station located on the UC Davis campus. When he is not working, he is playing outside with his two boys, Leo and Miles.

Graduate Student, English Dept., UCLA

A former web designer and programmer, David Shepard’s interests center around code as art form and gaming, but he has also done work on early radio. With Alison Walker and Jessica Pressman, he has published Media-Specific Analysis: Analyzing the Specificities of Digital Texts, a web project that explores the specificity of presenting information in various digital platforms. He is currently writing on games and authorship.

Graduate Student, English Dept., UC Davis

Andrew Hageman is a doctoral student in the English Department at the University of California, Davis, pursuing his degree with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory, and he is a member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). His current research focuses on re-envisioning ecocriticism in a posthumanities context by analyzing the intersections of ecology, technology, and ideology in literature and cinema. Of particular interest are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, cyberpunk and cybernetic fiction, Bruce Sterling and his “dot-green future,” and the films of David Lynch; and ever on the periphery, Chinese film & culture with an affinity for contemporary Shanghai. Recent conference presentations include “Floating Consciousness: Lou Ye’s Suzhou River as Posthumanist Tributary of Mainland Chinese Cinema” at the ACSS Conference in Shanghai 2005 (forthcoming in a volume on Chinese Eco-Cinema) and “Herzog and Treadwell Lost in the Grizzly Gaze: Grizzly Man and Eco-Cinema” at the 2006 Film & History Conference in Dallas.

Graduate Student, English Dept., UCLA

Sue Lewak is a doctoral candidate in the department of English at UCLA. She specializes in 20th century American literature, little magazines (hard-copy/online self-publication), and literature and the environment. She is currently completing a dissertation entitled: “Soft Poems: Access to Raw Tools.”

Graduate Student, Geography Dept., UC Berkeley
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Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His work involves deliberately blurring the lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us. His most recent projects involve close examinations of state secrecy, the California prison system, and the CIA’s practice of “extraordinary rendition.”

Graduate Student, English, UC Davis

Dan Thomas-Glass is a PhD candidate in English at UC Davis. His research focuses on experimental and avant-garde poetics since 1970, with particular attention to rap music, language poetry, and the relationship of cultural production to urbanism. His dissertation has recently been described as “an attempt to make a formal reading of the traces left by the seemingly-crushed desire for collectivity that rose out of urban politics and practice in the Sixties and Seventies.” He is especially interested in the city as media and mediation, and the ways that new technologies arise within and against its soundscape.

Graduate Student, English, UC Davis
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Kara Thompson is a Ph.D. student in the English department at the University of California, Davis. She has a designated emphasis in Critical Theory and is also affiliated with the Davis Humanities Institute’s Queer Research Cluster. She is currently writing her dissertation, Recycling Native America, with Many Reservations. The project uncovers what she calls “archives of the present” on or near American Indian reservations, exploring how archive and present might intersect, although they are traditionally opposed. The project draws methodologically on trauma studies, but departs significantly from the field’s canonical texts and attention to depression, anger, and illness. Instead, she focuses on American Indian cultural productions that actually utilize forgetting, nonrepresentability and disappearance to mark collective experiences of positive cultural memories emerging in the present. She is also working on a corollary new media project, “Sitings: Visualizing Native America,” which investigates the relationship between technology and Native America and asks how American Indian spaces are read with technologies such as Google Earth and Wikipedia.

Graduate student, Computer Science Dept., UC Santa Barbara
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John Roberts is a doctoral student in Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara who currently holds a fellowship in the National Science Foundation IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program) at UCSB on Interactive Digital Media. His current research focuses on providing support for penbased interaction in video segmentation. Additional research interests include Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), especially as it intersects with Personal Information Management, and Ubiquitous Computing. Roberts took his M.S. in Computer Science from San Francisco State U. in 2005 with a thesis titled “Browsing in Large, Time-Dependent Data Set” (pdf). His co-authored papers (published or forthcoming) include: “Visualizations for Browsing in Large Datasets‿ (pdf); “Making Favorites Useful‿ (pdf); “Easy and Effective Virtual Tours on the World Wide Web‿ (The Society for Imaging Science and Technology, Internet Imaging VI. San Jose, CA, USA, January 18-20, 2005); “An Interface Markup Language for Web3D‿ (pdf); and “Histogram-Based Visualizations for Large, Time-Dependent Data Sets‿ (pdf).

Graduate Student, English Dept., UC Riverside
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Nowell Marshall is a doctoral student at the University of California, Riverside. His research interests include gothic and romantic literature, theories of corporeality and affect, pedagogy, and Web development. He has presented at national and international conferences and has two book chapters forthcoming, one addressing melancholia in William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion and another considering the intersections of aesthetics, post-9/11 xenophobia, and the monstrous body in the context of massively multiplayer online gaming.

Graduate Student, Visual Studies Program, UC Irvine

Garnet Hertz is a Fulbright Scholar, Research Fellow at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, and is completing a Ph.D. in Visual Studies at the University of California Irvine. He also holds an MFA from the Arts Computation Engineering program at UCI and has completed UCI’s Critical Theory Emphasis. His current interests include the history, theory and practice of electro/mechanical art, computing, digital/internet art and robotics. He has shown his work at several notable international venues including Ars Electronica and SIGGRAPH and is also founder of Dorkbot-Socal, a monthly Los Angeles-based lecture series on electronic art. Popular press about his work is widespread, disseminating through 25 countries in publications including The New York Times, Wired News, I.D. Magazine, The Washington Post, Slashdot, NPR, USA Today, NBC, CBS, TV Tokyo, ZDTV and CNN Headline News.

Graduate Student, Art Dept., UC Santa Barbara
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Mike Godwin is a graduate student in the Art Studio department at UC Santa Barbara. He works primarily with two-dimensional media – drawing, painting, and programming. An amateur naturalist, archaeologist, and interplanetary geophysics buff, Mike does his best to let environmental history and the technology column inform his landscape paintings.

Graduate Student, School of Education, UC Santa Barbara
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James Ford is a doctoral student in education at UCSB. His general research interests are in writing studies, rhetoric, and technical communication. More specifically, he is interested in the way technology (namely augmented reality systems) impacts literacy practices, not only in educational settings, but in the workplace, and in common societal practices such as in political campaigns, tourism, and entertainment. His background is in technical communication and writing studies. He received his master’s degree in technical communication from Texas Tech University and began his studies at UCSB in 2004.
Currently, James is working with fellow Transliteracies Research Assistant Marc Breisinger on LEMMA. Along with researching applications of this technology in education, research is also being conducted in an attempt to better understand how users of enhanced reality environments represent their conceptual understanding of the abstract in 2D.

Graduate Student, Media Arts & Technology Program, UC Santa Barbara

Angus Forbes is a graduate student in Media Arts and Technology (Visual and Spatial Arts emphasis) at UC Santa Barbara. His research interests include information visualization, augmented intelligence, artificial creativity, machine learning, and education. Angus was the founder of Synaesthetic Software, a company that develops music education software. He currently works for the National Geospatial Digital Archive as a programmer and interface designer. Angus is also the drummer for Chamisa Mesa, an experimental noise-rock band. In a former life, Angus was a PhD student in British and American Literature at the University of Utah.

Graduate Student, Theater Dept., UCLA
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Jason Farman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Theater at UCLA. He is currently working on his dissertation entitled, “Pixilated Performances: Digital Bodies on the Digital Stage” (under the advisement of Sue-Ellen Case, N. Katherine Hayles, Mark Poster, and Haiping Yan). He is the recipient of the 2005-2006 Chancellor’s Fellowship for Dissertation Research from the University of California. He has also received the Thomas F. Marshall Grant from the American Society for Theatre Research (2005) and the Aaron Curtis Taylor Memorial Fellowship for Critical Studies in Theater from the School of Theater, Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA (2004).

Working at the intersection of digital media and performance, Jason’s work investigates the modes of bodily signification on digital stage spaces. He has presented his research at numerous conferences across the country. Recently, he was invited to present on the “Fresh Print: Emerging Scholars” panel at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in San Francisco. His paper, “The Virtual Artaud: Computer Virus as Performance Art,” which was recently published, was derived from his dissertation chapter on digital bodies in performance. This chapter theorizes the modes of signification and proprioception surrounding the body and the computer in an era of fluid global borders, increased surveillance, and the “posthuman” body.

Jason is a co-editor for the journal Extensions: The Online Journal of Embodied Technology and also designed the website for the 2005 issue of the journal. He has designed several websites for colleges and universities, including UCLA’s new Center for Performance Studies.

Graduate Student, English Dept., UC Santa Barbara

Donna Beth Ellard is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at UCSB. She is currently working on her dissertation, “A Death So Sublime: Theorizing Death and Dying in Medieval England.” Her interests include Anglo-Saxon Literature and Archaeology, Sublime Theory, Textuality Studies, and Arabic Language. In 2005, Donna Beth received a US State Department FLAS Title VI Fellowship to study Arabic at the American University in Cairo.

Visiting Graduate Student, Computer Science Dept., UC Santa Barbara, from the Ludwig – Maximilian – University Munich, Germany

Marc Breisinger’s current research project, LEMMA, tries to evaluate the benefits of computer assisted learning environments and the advantages that an exclusively available tutoring system might hold for the student. His further research interests cover computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality, human computer interaction and ubiquitous computing.

Graduate Student, Visual Studies Program, UC Irvine

Nathan Blake is a doctoral student in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. He received a master’s degree in Media Studies from The New School, writing a thesis on sensation, proprioception, and neuroaesthetics in relation to video. His areas of interest include televisual and cinematic crises and atrocity, apocalyptic imagery, combat tactical displays and video games, wound culture, intercorporeality, haptic vision and space, sensory substitution, mirror neurons, phantom limbs, somatophrenia, and posthuman ethics. He is cofounder and coeditor of the Visual Studies Journal, Octopus.

Graduate Student, English Department, UCLA

Alison Walker is a doctoral student in the English Department at UCLA. She received a master’s degree in English from UC Riverside. Alison focuses her studies on theories of new media and medieval literature. Her areas of interest include explorations into pre- and postmodern reading culture, the Old English elegies, anchoritic literature, medievalism, and theories of affect. Alison recently published an article called “Destabilizing Order, Challenging History: Octavia Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, and Affective Beginnings” in the Spring 2005 issue of Extrapolation. Currently she is writing an article about the 1922 silent film, Häxan, forthcoming in a collection on medievalism. Alison co-authored an interactive fictional narrative called The Many Voices of Saint Caterina of Pedemonte.

Recently Alison worked with the Computer Science department at UCLA in creating a piece of locative interactive fiction called Nan0sphere.

Graduate Student, Film and Media Studies Dept., UC Santa Barbara

Nicole Starosielski is a PhD student in Film and Media Studies at UCSB. Her current research interests include media historiography, perception and affect of digital media, and 3-D animation environments. She is also a media artist working in the integration of theory and production at the intersection of the humanities, sciences and arts. She has participated in the UCSB IGERT program in Interactive Digital Multimedia and is currently the research assistant for UCSB’s Center for Film, Television and New Media. Her recent projects include TechConnect (a mockumentary about technology and community), Bleach (an experimental ethnography on race, gender and family) and Minotour (a location-aware mobile tour application that weaves a spatial tale from Wikipedia).

Graduate Student, English Dept., UCLA
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Jessica Pressman is a doctoral candidate in English at UCLA. She is writing a dissertation titled Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media, which examines a prominent strategy in innovative online electronic literature: the “remediation” of literary modernism. She worked for the Electronic Literature Organization from 2002-2004, facilitating the “State of the Arts Symposium” and “Hyper_Text,” a yearlong reading series in electronic literature at the Hammer Museum.

Graduate Student, Film and Media Studies Dept., UC Santa Barbara

Joshua Neves is a PhD student in Film and Media Studies at UCSB. His present research interests focus on media events and media environments—from late 19th century electrical exhibitions to the contemporary Olympic Games. Joshua is currently involved in planning a graduate student conference—Media Fields—examining the epistemological, spatial and atmospheric interrelations of media spaces and disciplines, to be held at UCSB in April 2007.

Graduate Student, English Dept., UC Los Angeles

Kate Marshall is a Ph.D. student in English at UCLA. Her dissertation, “Corridor: Communication, Fiction, and the Organization of the American Interior,” looks at the traffic conditions of communication in twentieth-century American fiction through their spatial and informational transit systems. While her recent work is focused on architecture and media in pre-Cold War fiction, she has published on nanotechnology and risk theory, and has co-developed several interactive research projects on elements of narrative. Before beginning her graduate work, Marshall edited and wrote for technology and new media publications in San Francisco and London.

Transliteracies Project Research Coordinator; Graduate Student, English Dept., UC Santa Barbara
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Kimberly Knight is a doctoral student in Literature at UC Santa Barbara. Her research interests include literary and cultural theory; digital and information culture; new media literature and art; and twentieth century literature. She is currently writing her dissertation entitlted Media Epidemics: Viral Structures in Literature and New Media. Knight is a member of the development team of The Agrippa Files: an Online Archive of Agrippa (a book of the dead) and has served as the RA for the Transcriptions Studio at UCSB. She is also the Flash designer and co-author of the Transliteracies History of the Book project, “In the Beginning Was the Word” (forthcoming).

Graduate Student, Art and Media History / Theory and Criticism Program, UC San Diego

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Graduate Student, English Dept. UC Santa Barbara

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Graduate Student, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, UC Santa Barbara

Monica Bulger is a doctoral student at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education and Director of the Bren Graduate Writing Center. Her research interests include educational technologies, online literacy, and student engagement. She currently works with the Technology in Education research initiative, an interdisciplinary team that studies the impacts of technology on student learning.

Graduate Student, Communications Dept., UC San Diego

Ayhan Aytes is a Visual Media researcher with a special focus on ethno-cultural interfaces. His recent project, “Remembrance of Media Past,” explores various interaction models for alternative cultural representations in digital media, influenced by visual analysis of pre-modern media such as illuminated manuscripts, maps and miniature books. His photography and multimedia works were recently exhibited in a joint project in Istanbul, “Reading the City of Signs: Istanbul: Revealed or Mystified.” He holds a master’s degree in Communication Design from the Institute of Design in Chicago. He is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of California San Diego.

Graduate Student, Literature Department, UC Santa Cruz

Evan Calder Williams is a doctoral candidate in the Literature department at University of California Santa Cruz, where he works on Marxist theory, film, aesthetics, and cultural history. He’s writing a dissertation on misanthropy and dialectical thought in the political cinema of Italy and France in the ’70s. His book, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, is forthcoming from Zero Books. He writes the blog Socialism and/or Barbarism.

Graduate Student, Film Studies Department, UC Berkeley
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Irene Chien is a doctoral student in Film Studies at UC Berkeley, where she writes and teaches about race and gender in cinema and new media. Her current research is on body-activating video games such as Dance Dance Revolution, and the intersection of kung fu cinema and video games.

Graduate Student, Rhetoric Department, UC Berkeley

Brooke Belisle is a graduate student in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley working on photography, film, video, and digital media. She received an A.B. from Princeton University and a master’s degree from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. She is particularly interested in theoretical and philosophical approaches to technologically mediated artworks. Her current research explores the multiple phenomenologies that have emerged historically around “new” media, especially considering concepts of time, perception and sensation as brought to bear on digital aesthetics.

Transliteracies Project Research Coordinator; Graduate Student, Comparative Literature Department, UC Santa Barbara
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Elizabeth Swanstrom is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at UC Santa Barbara. Her research interests include twentieth-century Latin-American and American literatures, the literature of the fantastic, history of science, media theory, and science-fiction film and literature. Swanstrom is a member of the development and editorial team of The Agrippa Files: An Online Archive of Agrippa (a book of the dead). In addition to her academic work, she writes short fiction and serves as co-editor for the online literary journal Sunspinner. She is currently working on a dissertation that examines the relation between network technologies and subjectivity in literature and art.

Graduate Student, Sociology Dept., UC Santa Barbara
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Katrina Kimport is a doctoral student in the Sociology Department at UC Santa Barbara. Her areas of research interest include gender, social movements, sexuality, and culture. For her master’s thesis, she analyzed how actors in social movements framed their claims in the debate over emergency contraception and what these framings communicated about their understandings of gender.