NOTE: This profile page is for current students. Alums, please check out the Department's alum page, where you can stay connected, fill out an alumni survey, and more.
Robin Anderson
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Robin earned his BA from UNC Chapel Hill and MA from Simmons College. He earned his barista certification from the Specialty Coffee Association of America. He plans to earn his yoga certification in the near future. Figure skating has become a recent love of his and hopes to coach at some point. Oh..yes…academics…the prospectus seems like a life long struggle but he hopes to research how neoliberal policies impact class-consciousness within the local food system. He currently produces a local radio program titled Farm-to-Fork. The show is currently descriptive and pedagogical but the producers hope to balance this with a critical discursive tone in researching the food systems within the Pioneer Valley. Finally, he is the Graduate Student Senate (GSS) treasurer and will continue this post for the 2012-13 academic year. The officers of the GSS have questioned and challenged the role of University administrators to create policies unilaterally and their assumption that revenue generating is the best way to operate.
Stephanie Aragão
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Stephanie is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Communication at UMass. She received a B.A. magna cum laude in Communication from George Washington University and an M.S. with Distinction from the London School of Economics. Some of her previous work includes a critical discourse analysis of gender roles in popular film and a social semiotic analysis of race and news coverage of missing women. Her current research interests involve utilizing a critical/cultural studies approach to explore the role of individual and institutional identities in cultural production and consumption behavior. She enjoys traveling, writing, cooking, eating, and blogging about cooking and eating Recipe Blog
Bryan Baldwin
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Bryan Baldwin is currently Vice President for University Advancement and Strategic Planning at Bridgewater State University. Prior to assuming that position at BSU, he served as Chief of Staff to the University President and Executive Director of Communications and Public Affairs. Currently striving (struggling?) to turn ABD into PhD, Bryan's research examines the democratic spirit and deliberative power of on-line discussion boards hosted by a variety of emerging and traditional news sites. In addition to being a PhD-wannabe, Bryan has a Master's in Political Communication from Emerson College and Bachelor's Degree in Economics and Political Science from UMass-Amherst. He has also completed post-graduate studies at Harvard University's Institute for Education Management (IEM) and was trained in public diplomacy at the Canadian Foreign Service Institute. HIs scholarly interests include public discourse, quantitative research methods, political communications and new communication technologies. As a professional, Bryan is actively involved in managing executive communications, media relations, speechwriting, and strategic planning. He has taught undergraduate and graduate students at Suffolk University, Emerson and Bridgewater, and has led numerous non-profit organizations in strategic planning exercises. In the few hours per year when he's not working, he's an avid SCUBA diver, hiker and traveler.
Greg Blackburn
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My principal research interest is media effects. Working from a quantitative, empirical perspective, I am interested in studying the interplay between media violence and portrayals of masculinity, and how these can impact thoughts, attitudes, and affect regarding aggression and gender roles. Additional areas of interest include interactive media, political expression on the internet, and censorship.
Chris Boulton
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Chris Boulton received a B.A. in History with a concentration in Media Studies from Macalester College. Since graduation, Chris has worked for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, taught documentary film production at the University of Cuenca in Ecuador, and wrote scripts for the Travel Channel, CourtTV, and Discovery. Inspired by the emerging media reform movement, Chris re-entered the academy in 2004 to research media literacy and consumer culture. For more about Chris, visit his website.
Alison Brzenchek
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Aliison Brzenchek holds a BS in Human Development and Family Studies from the Pennsylvania State University and a MSW from the University of Michigan. Prior to starting her work as a doctoral student, Alison worked for three years as an Adjunct Faculty member at the University of Michigan in the Communication and Women’s Studies Departments. Alison is the founder of RECLAIM Media Literacy Services and she has served on the Board of Directors for the Action Coalition for Media Education since the fall of 2000. Ms. Brzenchek has presented at regional and national conferences for organizations, such as: The American College Health Association, International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals, American Sociological Association, Academy for Eating Disorders, Action Coalition for Media Education and Alliance for a Media Literate America, regarding her prevention research, media reform efforts and her media literacy, activism and advocacy programming. Additionally, Ms. Brzenchek has been featured as an expert on Public Radio based on her body image research at the University of Michigan. Alison’s current research interests include critical cultural studies and media literacy. In particular, she is interested in media portrayals of gender, media representation in reality television and the role political satire (e.g. The Daily Show) plays in public awareness of political, social and cultural issues.
Allison Burr-Miller
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I am a fourth year doctoral student at UMASS. My research deals with rhetorics of space, memory, and identity particularly with regard to sporting institutions. I recently had an essay on Fantasy Baseball come out in the Southern Journal of Communication. My dissertation deals with the retro trend in contemporary Major League Baseball parks.
Kate Cassidy
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Kate is currently pursuing her M.A. in Communication at UMass. She received a B.A. in both Media & Communication and Political Science at Muhlenberg College, where her research explored representations of feminism, gender and power in primetime television dramas and high fashion advertising. Currently, her research interests involve utilizing framing theory to examine depictions of female political leaders in U.S. cable news programming. Other academic interests include media and civic literacy in the classroom. Before coming to UMass, Kate worked as the communications coordinator for a lobbying group.
Tovar Cerulli
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Tovar split his undergraduate years between Dartmouth College and Eugene Lang College of the New School for Social Research, where he received his B.A. Over the next fifteen years, he worked as a carpenter, logger, and freelance writer. He was awarded a graduate school fellowship by UMass in 2009 and completed his M.A. thesis — Meat and Meanings: Adult-Onset Hunters' Cultural Discourses of the Hunt — in 2011. He is now enrolled as a Ph.D. student. His research interests include cultural discourse analysis, ethnography, food, hunting, and human relationships with nature. Tovar is also the author of The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance (2012).
Mariama M. Changamire Shaw
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Mariama Changamire Shaw received both her B.A. (1996) and M.A. (2000) in Communication at DePaul University, with emphases in Mass Media, Multicultural Communication, and Organizational Communication. She also received undergraduate and graduate certificates in the Women’s Studies Program while at DePaul. Her research focus is on the study of global linguistic survival strategies, recasting these strategies as tools of empowerment toward facing the challenges of the expanding global economy. She believes that exposing linguistic hegemony is critical to the liberation and survival of the most underserved and disenfranchised world citizens, and is open to historic and dynamic possibilities of language and culture, scaffolding strengths revealed in communicative identities. Other areas of interest include the pragmatic voices of women of color, and the violence of silences in communities around gendered violence, incest, and rape, highlighting notions of dominance and power.
Ellen Correa
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Ellen earned her B.A. in Human Communication from the University of California Monterey Bay and her M.A. in Intercultural Relations from Antioch University MacGregor. Her dissertation research explores the ethical and relational implications of assimilation in a racially/ethnically stratified society.
Anilyn Díaz
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Gregory Dorchak
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Gregory earned an M.A. in Communication and Rhetorical Studies from Syracuse University, where he also attended as an Undergraduate. His main interest is the maintenance and evolution of traditional folk music communities, specifically the Celtic music of Cape Breton Island. He has presented at the American Folklore Society national conference, as well as Folklore conferences in Europe. His interests are in rhetorical theory, memory studies, folk studies, and performance theory.
Matthew Ferrari
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Matthew Ferrari received a B.A. in Art History and Visual Culture from Bates College where he wrote a thesis on social and institutional theories of art. Following graduation he spent four years working as the Digitization Project manager and photographer for the H.F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, and then returned to school in 2004 to pursue an M.A. in film and media studies from Ohio University focusing on world cinema (and Thai film in particular). He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Communication at UMass where his work addresses politics of cultural representation and consumption/spectatorship in film and television culture. Matthew’s current research deals with popular “primitivism(s)” and post-colonial media commodity forms, primitivism and modernity, and discourses of rural/urban and “nature” in film and television.
Fadia Hasan
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Fadia Hasan is currently a PhD student in the Communication Department at UMASS, Amherst. She earned her BA from Hampshire College with an undergraduate thesis titled, "The Politics of Femininity in Mainstream Indian Films". Her MA was in Communications from University of Massachussetts, Amherst. Fadia's focus in her Masters has been Global Consumer & Class Cultures and Alternative Economies. Her Masters thesis is titled, "Fair Trade Practices in Contemporary Bangladeshi Society: Community Development, Cultural Revival And Sustainability through a Participatory Approach."
Brett Ingram
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Brett Ingram is a Ph.D. student in the Communication department at UMass Amherst. He holds an M.A. in English and a Graduate Certificate in Cinema Studies from Northeastern University. His past work centered on alternative paradigms of masculinity–embodied in the figure of the “dandy” or “aesthete”– in Victorian and Modern British and American prose, and representations of sexuality in early Soviet film. His current interests include critical cultural studies, media literacy, rhetorical theory, and the moral politics of contemporary humor.
Perry Irwin
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Perry has joined the Department’s PhD program after 10 years marketing a variety of products and services for companies in Milwaukee; Columbus, Ohio; and Northampton, Mass. He holds an M.S. in journalism & mass communication from Iowa State University, where he completed a thesis on the professional socialization of mass media recruits, and a B.S. in communication from the University of Illinois. In addition to more than 15 years as an award-winning journalist, Perry has taught journalism and other media-related courses as Assistant Professor of Journalism at West Virginia University and elsewhere. Other past research interests include diffusion and adoption of innovations and communication patterns within broadcast news organizations. The main interest, presently, is representations of labor in the media.
Dijana Jelaca
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Dijana’s work lies at the intersections of cinema and critical cultural studies, as well as trauma, affect, queer and feminist theoretical approaches. Dijana holds an MA in Humanities and Social Thought from NYU, and a BA in English from the University of Banja Luka, Bosnia. Her doctoral dissertation concerns post-Yugoslav filmmaking, and particularly the role of film in establishing affective economies with which certain responses to trauma become legitimized through the prism of ethnic, as well as gender, class and religious divisions.
Liliya Karimova
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Liliya’s dissertation explores the rise of Muslim piety among Tatar women in the central Russian Republic of Tatarstan. She conducted her ethnographic research among Muslim Tatar women with the help of the IREX IARO research grant in 2009-2010. In her work, Liliya examines how Muslim Tatar women negotiate and perform their identities vis-à-vis Islam in the context of a post-Soviet Russia, where they are both an ethnic and religious minority. While Liliya focuses on examining the discursive and performative aspects of women's identities, her interest in the policy implications of her research led her to participate in the SSRC dissertation development workshop (2010) and IREX policy symposium (2011).
Stephanie Kent
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Steph is interested in intercultural group dynamics and group discourses as microsocial instantiations of macrosocial patterns. A U.S. nationally certified American Sign Language/English Interpreter, she focuses on the institutionalization of power relations through taken-for-granted assumptions about interpreter behavior, decision-making, and discourse. Steph has published in national and international interpreting journals and Critical Link 4: Professionalization of interpreting in the community (2007), and is always on alert for particular events theorized by James Cumming as “problematic moments” that present groups with the possibility of altering pre-established terms of interaction. Currently, Steph is researching the discourse of spoken language interpreters at the European Parliament, tentatively titled: A Discourse of Danger and Loss. One category in her weblog, Reflexivity, is devoted to teaching.
Elena Khatskevich
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Elena Khatskevich received her higher education diploma with specialization in teaching English and philology from the School of Foreign Languages at Buryat State University in Russia, and her Master of Education degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Throughout her professional career she has taught English as a foreign language to university students, worked for a variety of international non-profit organizations as well as the Center for Communication Programs of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Moscow. Her research focus is intercultural communication, ethnography of communication, health communication. She is also interested in developing, implementing and evaluating communication campaigns for behavior change.
Changwook Kim
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Changwook received a MA in Communication from Seoul National University. His research interests include cultural work, creative industry, and cultural production from a critical/cultural studies and political economy orientation. He has participated in an exchange program at University of Tokyo. He is currently working on a PhD at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Han Lee
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Han earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees in Communication from the University of Illinois at Chicago. In Chicago, he was a research intern for the HIVNET 015 EXPLORE! Study through Howard Brown Health Center. Han has participated in Association of Internet Researchers, National Communication Association, and International Communication Association conferences, and won first place for the 2004 Carl J. Couch Internet Research Award competition. He has recently published a book chapter titled “Queering Race in Cyberspace” in “Media Queered: Visibility and Its Discontents” (edited by Kevin G. Barnhurst and published by Peter Lang).
Sunny Lie
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Sunny Lie received her B.A. in Communication and East Asian Languages and Cultures from University of Southern California, and a dual Master's degree in Global Media and Communications from USC and London School of Economics and Political Science. Before entering academia, she has worked in various international organizations such as United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and Voice of America (VOA). She recently co-authored a book chapter along with Donal Carbaugh, Liene Locmele and Nadezhda Sotirova on ethnographic studies in intergroup communication. She's currently working on her dissertation which examines the communication of identity in a Chinese Indonesian Evangelical community in Boston, MA.
Liene Ločmele
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Liene is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at UMass Amherst. She received a Fulbright student fellowship and joined the department in 2009 after spending several years working for the PR industry in her homeland of Latvia. Liene is interested in interpersonal and intercultural aspects of human communication with a special focus on the communication of Latvian identity. Liene has a BA in Communication and Public Relations from Vidzeme University of Applied Science in Latvia, and an MA in Intercultural Communication from the University of Jyväskyla in Finland.
Dawn Lovegrove
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Zachary McDowell
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Zach McDowell earned a B.S. in Communication Studies from Arizona State University at the West Campus, focusing on Rhetoric, Critical Theory, and the Philosophy of Communication. Zach earned his Masters Degree at Arizona State University as well, research and thesis focusing on Prophetic Advocacy, Language, and Being-in-the-World-Together. His current focus is in the area of advocacy, communication, and collaboration in a digital environment, especially the issues surrounding the Open Source / Free Software Movement, Digital Rights Management, Peer to Peer Sharing, and (Intellectual) Property. Zach has presented at NCA, ICA, CSA, and numerous other venues, as well as publishing numerous pieces in a variety of places. He is currently working on his dissertation, a media archeology of digital sharing technology. For more information please visit his website.
Eve Ng
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Eve Ng completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and graduate research in Linguistics from the State University of New York-Buffalo, for which she conducted fieldwork on the Algonquian language Passamaquoddy. Along with her doctoral studies in Communication, she is pursuing an Advanced Certificate in Feminist Studies through the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies. Her research areas include the cultural production of digital media; multiplatform programming in commercial media; class, taste, and distinction; and queer representation in popular media. She has presented her work at venues including meetings of the American Anthropological Association, American Sociological Association, Console-ing Passions feminist media conference, International Communication Association, Flow TV, International Gender and Language Association, and National Communication Association.
CV
An article for which I drew a cartoon!
Gamze Onut
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Sreela Sarkar
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Sreela holds a B.A in English Literature from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi and a masters degree in Communication from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has directed and scripted documentary films for Indian television and collaborative international projects. Her films include topics such as child labor in glass bangle industry in India, grassroots environment movements in different parts of India and intellectual traditions of one of India’s oldest cities, Banaras. Sreela’s M.A thesis (2004) was a case study of an inner city, community video group in Chicago and involved ethnographic methods as well as semiotic analysis. More recently, she is interested in exploring the role of ICTs in development programs and policies in South Asia and social movements around communication technologies. She has presented her work at Communication conferences including ICA and Central States Communication Association conventions.
Song Shi
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Song Shi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at UMass Amherst. His research interests include three inter-related fields: the influences of new media on social changes and development; digital divide, new media, and ICT; digital copyright. He is a junior fellow at the Center for Communication for Sustainable Social Change at UMass Amherst. He is currently working on his dissertation which examines new media for social change and development in China. In his research, he employs both qualitative method and quantitative methods. His co-authored papers have been published by International Communication Gazette and Development in Practice.
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Natasha Shrikant
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Natasha is currently pursuing a PhD in Communication at UMass. She received her B.S. in Communication from UT Austin (hook ‘em!), and an M.A. in Communication from the University of Illinois. Natasha’s research interests include using ethnography and discourse analysis to analyze the relationship between language, culture, and identity. More specifically, Natasha examines how second generation Indians living in the U.S. perform racial, ethnic, and cultural identities in everyday interaction.
Razvan Sibii
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Razvan earned his B.A. degree in Journalism/Mass Communication from the American University in Bulgaria in 2001. Following graduation, he worked as a full-time political reporter for two Romanian publications. He is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at UMass Amherst (Communication) while working as a lecturer and chief undergraduate advisor in the Journalism Program. His Master’s thesis was built around the concepts of ideology & culture and “Romanian-ness.” Since 2003, he has taught more than 30 undergraduate classes as a stand-alone instructor, both in-class and online (e.g. Newswriting and Reporting, Media Ethics, Public Speaking, Interpersonal Communication, Media and Society, News Analysis, Cultural Codes in Communication) at UMass Amherst (Communication and Journalism) and Holyoke Community College. Raz’s academic interests include issues of identity, culture, and ideology; political communication; media & storytelling; and critical pedagogy.
Niall Stephens
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Niall's dissertation is on environmentalist discourses in southern Chile. His research has been funded by the Fulbright foundation, by the UMass Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies, and by the Communication department's Anca Romantan fund for Graduate International Research. His most recent publication, on the interpretation of public opinion polls in the US media before the invasion of Iraq, appears in the journal Critical Studies in Media Communication.
Timothy Sutton
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Timothy Sutton is a perpetual grad student with no plans of completing his Ph.D. in order to avoid paying back the massive loans he has accrued. He is interested in connections between critical pedagogy and DiY media with regards to media literacy and social movements. Timothy belongs to the Education Radio Collective, which produces a weekly podcast that participates in movement building and challenges the dominant discourse around neoliberal education reform.
Brion van Over
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Brion holds a BA in Communication from SUNY Oswego, and an MA in Communication from SUNY Albany. His reserach interests include the ethnographic investigation of communicative practices in a variety of cultural scenes. More specifically, he is interested in cultural conceptions of mystical and sacred experience and their intersection with cultural premises about and for communication, identity, emotion, sociality, and place.
Kimberly Walsh
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Kim received her B.A. in Communication from Boston College, with a minor in Hispanic Studies. Her undergraduate research focused on gender portrayals in contemporary American sitcoms and Mattel's public relations strategies following the toy recall crisis. Before pursuing a graduate degree at UMass, Kim worked as a healthcare PR professional and a production editor for an online physician community. She is currently completing her M.A. thesis, entitled, "Bullying on Teen Television: Patterns Across Portrayals and Online Fan Responses." Generally, her intellectual interests involve children and media, media aggression, and media representations of gender. Kim's work has been published in The Journal of Popular Film and Television. She has presented at AEJMC, ECA, and ICA annual conferences.
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Danbi Yoo is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Communication at UMass Amherst. She received a B.A. in Mass Communication from the Yonsei Univerisity in South Korea, and earned her M.A. in Communication at the Yonsei University as well, where her research explored how people interact through visual media in specific socio-historical or political-economic contexts. Currently, her research interests involve utilizing discourse analysis and governmentality studies to examine the influence of neoliberal change on our everyday lives. Other academic interests include art production and consumption in capitalist societies. Before coming to UMass, Danbi participated as a producer in independent theater and film projects, and worked as an assistant researcher of academic institutions in Korea.
