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Visiting Scholars and Postdoctoral Associates

CMS/W takes pride in welcoming young and established scholars and helping them advance their own work, often 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.

How how to join us as a visiting scholar or postdoctoral associate.

Please use the MIT Directory for current offices and phone numbers.

Postdoctoral Associates

Anna Gibson

Anna D. Gibson studies the intersection of community, labor, and justice in digital spaces. She earned her MA and PhD from the Department of Communication at Stanford University, where her doctoral work focused on volunteer moderation on Facebook. During her graduate career she earned fellowships with the McCoy Family for Ethics in Society and the Stanford Ethnography Lab, and she was awarded the Centennial Award for excellence in teaching. Her research on content moderation has been published in Social Media + Society and Information, Communication and Society. Anna also holds a BA in linguistics and cognitive science from Pomona College.

Elisabeth Mesiner

Elisabeth Mesiner has a PhD from the University of Maryland from the department of Teaching & Learning, Policy & Leadership. She holds an MS from in curriculum and instruction with a focus on science education and a BS in social science education from Florida State University. Her research centers around reformed, responsive science instruction, problems of practice, and science teacher identity, particularly with early career science teachers. Prior to her doctoral studies, she was a sixth grade science teacher at a developmental lab school affiliated with Florida State University.

Elizabeth Stevens

Elizabeth Hyde Stevens studied semiotics and discursive writing at Brown University and then studied under fiction writers Michael Cunningham, Francisco Goldman, Meera Nair, and Jenny Offill at the Brooklyn College MFA Program. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in McSweeney’s, Salon, Explosion-Proof, The Awl, The Millions, Rolling Stone, RogerEbert.com, Fast Company, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She is the author of Make Art Make Money, which profiles Muppets-creator, patent-holder, and artist-entrepreneur Jim Henson. The book was praised by Inc., The AV Club, Brain Pickings, WGBH, and The Boston Globe. Elizabeth’s past teaching includes writing seminars at Boston University, Brooklyn College, Gotham Writers Workshop, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Harvard Extension School. She is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Clinical Research at Boston University School of Medicine, investigating dementia in Parkinson's Disease. She is a big fan of video games and the science fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, and she is currently working on a novel about life extension set in the year 2080.

Visiting Scholars

Brian Jacobson

Brian Jacobson, Professor of Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology and Director of the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture, is a historian of modern visual culture and media. Working at the intersection of cinema and media studies, the energy and environmental humanities, and the history of science and technology, he has published widely in academic journals and publications including The Atlantic and the Los Angeles Review of Books on topics including media technologies and infrastructure, corporate and industrial media (especially in oil and gas industries), and media representations of technology and industry. Jacobson is the author of Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (Columbia, 2015), a finalist for the Theater Library Associations’ Richard Wall Memorial Award, and editor of In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments (California, 2020), winner of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies award for Best Edited Collection and the Limina Prize for Best International Film Studies Book. With James Leo Cahill and Weihong Bao, he edited “Media Climates,” the Winter 2021 issue of Representations. He is currently completing two books: “The Cinema of Extractions” (under contract with Columbia University Press) and “The Art of Oil in France: A Global History, 1944-1975.” He graduated from the MIT Comparative Media Studies graduate program in 2005.