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.

 Links:      Home page

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

 Links:      Home Page

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.

 Links:      Under Construction

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.

 Links:      Home page

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.

 Links:      Media-Specific Analysis: Analyzing the Specificities of Digital Texts

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.

 Links:      Under Construction

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.”

 Links: Website

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.”

Paglen’s visual work has been shown at MASSMOCA (2006), the Warhol Museum (2007), Diverse Works (2005), and numerous other arts venues, universities, conferences, and public spaces. He has had one-person shows at Deadtech (2001), the LAB (2005), and Bellwether Gallery (2006).

Paglen has published articles in Art Journal, Cultural Geographies, Clamor Magazine, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Leonardo Music Journal, Cabinet Magazine, and the Village Voice. His first book, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights (co-authored with AC Thompson) was published by Melville House in September 2006. A book about the symbology of “black” military projects will be published in the fall of 2007.

Paglen has received grants and commissions from Rhizome.org, the LEF Foundation, Eyebeam, and the University of the Pacific. In 2005, he was awarded a Vectors Journal Fellowship at the University of Southern California.

Paglen holds a BA from UC Berkeley, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently completing a PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley.

 Links:      Home Page | Curriculum Vitae | “Unmarked Planes and Hidden Geographies”

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.

 Links:      Under Construction

 Quote:   

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]]> http://ucnewmedia.english.ucsb.edu/thompson-kara/ Thu, 22 Feb 2007 10:56:32 +0000 http://ucnewmedia.english.ucsb.edu/thompson-kara/ 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.

 Links:      Home page

 Quote:   

In scanning headlines from the late nineteenth century to the stock market crash—even knowing exactly how history turns out—I find myself drawn into the narrative, watching the dates jump forward in increments until the key words switch from “speculation” and “boom” to “depression” and “crash.” I click on the “next page” link at the bottom of my screen to see more and more pages of headlines as if I want to find out how the story ends. The experience reminds me, once again, that history is never finished and that the present is always waiting to change a past that has not yet happened.

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