About Comparative Media Studies/Writing
MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing offers an innovative academic program that applies critical analysis, collaborative research, and design across a variety of media arts, forms, and practices.
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Lupe Fiasco to Spend 2022-2023 at MIT
The year-long fellowship includes a spring semester rap course.
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A Bright Light on New York’s Bengali Past
From MIT News: “In Search of Bengali Harlem,” a new film co-created by Professor Vivek Bald, salutes South Asians who carved out new lives in the US, against the odds.
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Video: Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner, “Seeing Silicon Valley”
Acclaimed photographer Mary Beth Meehan and Silicon Valley historian and media scholar Fred Turner discuss their recently published and award-winning book Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America.
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Video: Charles North, The William Corbett Poetry Series
Charles North’s New and Selected Poems What It Is Like headed NPR’s Best Poetry Books of the Year. Among many other awards, he has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Poets Foundation Award.
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Video: Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech
Martha Minow presents what’s needed if the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press continues to hold meaning in the twenty-first century.
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Video: Oscar Winberg, “Archie Bunker Goes to Washington: How Television in the 1970s Remade Politics into Entertainment”
Recognizing the popularity of television, politicians learned how to use (and abuse) television entertainment to win votes, to fundraise, to promote their agenda, and to push for legislation.
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Video: Jens Pohlmann, “Platform Regulation and the Digital Public Sphere: Comparing the Discourse in Germany and the United States”
Drawing on computational methods, Jens Pohlmann analyzes the discussion about a German anti-hate speech law called the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) and the debate about a reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
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Video: “Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air”, Six Muslim Women in STEM
The poems they shared at this reading focus on family, identity, and homeland—where they come from and how that shaped who they are now.
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Video: Racquel Gates, “Reintroducing Melvin Van Peebles”
How to present new insights on Van Peebles, building on existing familiarity with the filmmaker and his work while avoiding cliches and hagiography.
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Video: Katherine Jewell, “Party City: WMBR, Institutional Change, and Democratic Media”
The history of WMBR at MIT from the 1960s to the 1980s, exploring how this station, with a license held by an independent non-profit corporation, built a meaningful community institution despite transformations within the university.
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Video, “David Thorburn: The William Corbett Poetry Series”
David Thorburn has been a teacher of literature for 57 years, 46 of them at MIT where he is Professor of Literature and Comparative Media. Knots is his first book of poetry.
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Video: Jorge Caraballo, “How to Use Audio Storytelling to Cultivate a Community and Keep it Engaged”
Caraballo draws from experience as the former Growth Editor at Radio Ambulante – Latin America’s most popular documentary podcast.
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Conversations at the Front Line of Climate
Novel communications infrastructure from the MIT Civic Design Initiative aims to support communities on the front lines of the climate crisis.
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Video: Eric Freedman, “Non-Binary Binaries and Unreal MetaHumans”
Are the MetaHuman Creator and similar simplified building tools democratizing the field of digital content creation?
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Video: Samantha N. Sheppard, “Changing the Subject: Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark and the Making of Black Women’s Film History”
How Nottage’s play and paratexts produce a speculative fiction and archive about Black women’s media histories, staging what she calls a phantom cinema.
