Visitors and Postdoctoral Associates

CMS/W takes pride in welcoming young and established scholars and helping them advance their own work by pairing them with one of our research groups. Past visitors have played key roles in our speaker series, contributed to masters student theses, and established long-term ties between MIT and other institutions.

Find out how how to join us as a visiting scholar or postdoctoral associate

Nancy Baym Research Affiliate nbaym@mit.edu		Nancy Baym is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, a couple of blocks to the east of CMS/W's haunts. Her work focuses on interpersonal relationships and new technologies. She is the author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity 2010), Internet Inquiry (co-authored with Annette Markham) (Sage 2009) and Tune In, Log On: Soaps Fandom and Online Community (Sage 1999). Her current research is about musicians' relationships with audiences and how social media affect them.
Katerina Cizek MIT Visiting Artist kcizek@yahoo.com		Director of the National Film Board of Canada’s multi-year HIGHRISE project, Katerina Cizek is an Emmy-winning documentary-maker working across multiple media platforms. Prior to HIGHRISE, she worked as the NFB’s Filmmaker in Residence. Her work has documented the digital revolution and has itself become part of the movement. For more information on the MIT Visiting Artists Program, visit Arts@MIT.
Sara Colombo Postdoctoral Fellow scolombo@mit.edu
Callum Cooper Visiting Scholar callumc@mit.edu		Callum Cooper is an artist and filmmaker. His work covers a spectrum of the moving image from traditional, linear filmmaking to interactive technology driven artworks. Cooper’s works are participatory in either their process, content or viewing experience. His linear films have screened internationally including Sundance 2011 (nominated best narrative short film) and Sundance 2013 (Jury Prize Focus Forward, short documentary). Cooper’s non-linear work has been extensively exhibited including the Barbican Centre London (2011) and Toronto International Film Festival (2012).
Mary Harrod Visiting Assistant Professor mgmh@mit.edu
Sun-ha Hong Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow sunha@mit.edu		Sun-ha Hong analyses how new media and its data become invested with ideals of precision, objectivity and truth – especially through aesthetic, speculative, and otherwise apparently non-rational means. He works to produce critical, historically informed diagnoses of the contemporary faith in "raw" data, sensing machines, and algorithmic decision-making, and of their public promotion as the next great leap towards objective knowledge. At MIT, he is working on completing one book project and beginning another. The first, "Data Epistemologies / Surveillance and Uncertainty", analyses the changing boundaries of the known, the probable and the unknowable vis-à-vis early twenty-first century technologies of state "dragnet" surveillance and self-tracking. The second, "A Speculative Literature for a Data-Driven Society", examines the genealogy of our imaginations about data, innovation and surveillance – from science fiction of the early twentieth century to experimental prototypes of ‘big’ data in the present day. He received his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His work has been published through journals like First Monday and European Journal of Cultural Studies. His CV and writing are available at: http://sunhahong.org
Jesper Juul Visiting Assistant Professor jesperj@mit.edu		Jesper Juul has been working with the development of video game theory since the late 1990′s. His book Half-Real on video game theory was published by MIT press in 2005. His most recent book "The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games" was published in the Spring of 2013. He maintains the blog The Ludologist on “game research and other important things”.
Pierre Tchetgen Predoctoral Fellow akwerius@mit.edu		Founder and director of the Word.Sound.Life. social network for media learning, Pierre Tchetgen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley working across multiple academic disciplines. As the recipient of a 2017-18 SHASS predoctoral fellowship in Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT, his research investigates the design of new media and rhythmic communication technologies grounded in the cultural tools and practices of West African drum language traditions. He recently co-authored The Wellness Guide--a DIY multimedia zine published by Word.Sound.Life. with students in his Reading and Composition course "Self & Lyric" (Spring 2017). Prior to Cal, he worked as DYN’s Digital Media Publishing curriculum developer in Chicago. His work as a poet, musician, educator and technology designer, has empowered youth voices through creativity and media making (podcasting, video making, digital music) for over 15 years and evolved into its own autonomous touring project through camps and festivals. His book of poetry, Dirges of Becoming, was published in 2010 by Afro Roots Hop press. He is the host of the Freedom Hour Radio show and a producer at KALX radio in Berkeley.
Jill Walker Rettberg Visiting Professor jillrett@mit.edu		Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen, and is spending the second half of 2017 as a visiting scholar at CMS/W. Her research interests include self-representation in social media, digital art and narrative, and the effects of contemporary visual technologies on art and culture. She is a long-time research blogger at jilltxt.net, and her most recent book is Seeing Ourselves through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves (Palgrave 2014).
Christopher Weaver Research Scientist and Lecturer csweaver@mit.edu		Chris Weaver teaches in Materials Science and Engineering and Comparative Media Studies/Writing. He received his S.M. from MIT and was the initial Daltry scholar at Wesleyan University, where he earned dual master's degrees in Japanese and Computer Science and a CAS Doctoral Degree in Japanese Ethnomusicology and Physics. The former Director of Technology Forecasting for ABC and Chief Engineer to the Subcommittee on Communications to the US Congress, he founded Bethesda Softworks, a leading software company that is credited with the development of physics-based sports simulation and creating the original John Madden Football for Electronic Arts as well as the Elder Scrolls role-playing series. He has numerous patents in interactive media, security, broadband and telecommunications engineering. A former member of the Architecture Machine Group and Fellow of the Research Program on Communications Policy, he is currently a Board Member of the Communications Technology Roadmap Group in the Microphotonics Center at MIT. In 2016, he was appointed a Distinguished Scholar in the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian.