Ph.D. Program Student Bios

2000 Cohort
2001 Cohort
2002 Cohort
2003 Cohort
2004 Cohort
2005 Cohort
2006 Cohort
2007 Cohort
2008 Cohort
Alumni

2000 Cohort

Hawley Johnson
Hawley Johnson’s research interests include nationalism and journalism’s role in democratization processes, post-conflict reconstruction, and transitional societies. From 2000-2004 she was the Associate Director of the Media and Conflict Resolution Program at New York University’s Department of Journalism where she managed a series of grants from the U.S. Department of State to improve reporting on human rights and diversity issues in Southeastern Europe. In cooperation with COI she is currently working on a study which will analyze the capacity of local media development NGOs in Southeastern Europe to become self-sustaining through organizational innovation and the formation of local and transnational networks. Her dissertation research explores the impact of media development policies in the former Yugoslavia. She received a B.A. cum laude from the American University School of International Service, an M.I.A. from the School of International and Public Affairs and a Harriman Certificate from the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.

2001 Cohort

Joe Cutbirth
Joe Cutbirth studies the interplay of traditional journalism and so-called "fake news" in presidential politics. His research examines how the political narrative crafted from the longstanding relationship between political professionals and political reporters coexists with the para-political satire of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and others. He is a former news reporter and political writer for the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram and communications director for the Texas Democratic Party, and worked for Texas Gov. Ann Richards' 1994 campaign and the Clinton-Gore 1996/Texas Democratic Party coordinated campaign. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and a master's degree in communication, culture and technology from Georgetown University. He teaches journalism and mass communications at Columbia and New York Universities and offers what is believed to be the first class specifically on the topic of "fake news" at NYU and The New School.

John Kelly
John Kelly's research interests include design processes and the development of content for interactive television and mobile devices. During his twelve years as a sound designer and producer of film, music, video and digital effects, Kelly focused on the innovative adaptation of emerging digital technologies to the demands of professional media production. In 1995, he became Director of Digital Media for Columbia's School of the Arts, with the responsibility of integrating digital tools into the school's graduate programs in Film, Visual Arts, Theatre and Writing. That year he led the Film division to become the first graduate program in the nation to make nonlinear technologies part of basic training and helped the Visual Arts program make digital arts part of its core curriculum. In 1996, Kelly created the school's curriculum for interactive media, establishing Interactive Design as the school's newest area of study. In 1999, he shifted his focus from teaching to research, joining IDL to help develop the formal study of Interactive Design. Kelly received his B.A. from Columbia University.
— Kelly, Fisher, Smith (2005) "Debate, Division, and Diversity: Political Discourse Networks in USENET Groups." Working paper for: Stanford Online Deliberation Conference, 2005

2002 Cohort

Karina Alexanyan
Karina Alexanyan's research interests involve media, culture and globalization. Her proposed dissertation title is “Globalization, Identity and the Internet--A Case Study of Russian Urban Youth (Moscow and St. Petersburg).” With this doctoral research, Karina aims to leverage her native insight and ties to Russia (social, cultural and linguistic) to help deepen our understanding of the role of global communication technologies in cultural globalization. Karina is a 2006 recipient of the Harriman Institute’s Pepsico Fellowship for Summer Research and Travel. Her professional experience centers around international issues, technology, education, arts and culture. She has directed an international service learning program, supervised software localization projects, managed a performance art space and produced an educational website raising global awareness among youth (www.worldtrek.org). She received her MPhil from Columbia University, has a M.A. in Communications from NYU and a B.A. in Linguistics and Modern Languages (French and Russian) from the Claremont Colleges.

Philip Kay
Philip Kay’s research interests include newspaper coverage and popular narratives of urban schools and youth; the metropolitan, student, ethnic, and alternative press; and journalism education. His dissertation, “Guttersnipes and Eliterates: City College in the Popular Imagination,” is a study of “the poor man’s Harvard” as cultural icon and perennial site of social conflict. He is currently the journalism program director and an assistant professor in the City College of New York’s department of Media & Communication Arts.

From 2000 to 2004 Kay was director of education programs at the New York Council for the Humanities. For most of the 1990s he was editor of the monthly magazine New Youth Connections (circ. 80,000). He has published three book-length collections of writing by New York City high schools students including Things Get Hectic: Teens Write About the Violence That Surrounds Them (Simon & Schuster, 1998) and Starting With ‘I’: Personal Essays by Teenagers (Persea Books, 1997). He holds an M. Phil. in Communications from Columbia University, where, in 1994-95, he was also a Revson Fellow on the Future of the City of New York. In addition, he has an M.A. in Latin American Civilization and a B.A. in Dramatic Literature, Theatre History, and Cinema, both from NYU.

Jane E. Turk
Jane E. Turk's research interests include the history of media institutions and media regulation, the intersection of mass media and commercial/consumer culture, and the relationship between mass media and democracy. Turk’s ongoing dissertation research examines the development of noncommercial media institutions in the United States, a country in which broadcasting was firmly established as a commercial enterprise. In her research, she approaches NPR as a double-articulated media network – both a network of production and content-distribution centers, and a network of particular subject positions and ideologies—and focuses specifically on the ways in which the network of NPR has transformed from its initial roots as a public-service educational initiative into a niche mass media brand.

Turk has designed and taught courses on critical media and cultural studies, media literacy, journalism and media history, mass communication, and communication theory. She has taught at Hunter College (New York, NY), Marymount College Manhattan (New York, NY), Lake Forest College (Lake Forest, IL), and DePaul University (Chicago, IL). She currently resides in Chicago, and can be contacted at jet2015[at]columbia.edu.

2003 Cohort

Joost van Dreunen
Joost van Dreunen is a PhD researcher at Columbia University and studies video games as an entryway into contemporary media culture. His dissertation, titled Games as Communication: the Practice of Discursive Game Play, shows that current strategy games connect to a larger reality of geopolitical conflict by intersecting online communities, user-created game modifications, and media space. Joost is an affiliate researcher at the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information, a member of the Center for Organizational Innovation, and the founder of the New York chapter for the Digital Games Research Association. Outside academia Joost works as a games analyst for companies such as DFC Intelligence (San Diego) and Nielsen Online. He lives in New York with his wife, Janelle, and maintains a blog at www.waffler.org

Jan Ellis
Jan Ellis is a student of the political economy of communications and participatory democracy. A print and broadcast journalist since 1983, she has focused much of her professional and academic attention on terrorism, oil and telecommunications in Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. Jan received her bachelor's and master's degrees from Columbia University, where she is now an adjunct. In addition to teaching, she aspires to applying first-hand knowledge of the world to communications crises here at home. Her research is part of the syllabus for courses at Columbia, Georgetown and Rutgers universities.

Sasha Meltzer
Sasha Meltzer’s primary focus is on the interplay between news, narrative and myth in civic life. She is particularly interested in the relationship between scandal, "infotainment," fear mongering and public policy. She holds a B.A. in History from Columbia University. She has worked at WNYC, the New York City affiliate of National Public Radio, and at The Commonwealth Club, a public affairs forum in San Francisco.

Olivier Sylvain
Olivier Sylvain is interested in communications policy and democratic theory. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at Fordham University where he teaches telecommunications law and administrative law. He is also a doctoral candidate in the communications program at Columbia University where he is completing research on the political development of the Radio Act of 1927. At Columbia, Olivier taught a two-semester undergraduate “core” course on “Contemporary Civilization,” which included close readings of texts in ethics, political economy, and social theory.

For three years before entering academia, Olivier was a litigation associate in the Washington, D.C. office of Jenner & Block, LLC. There, he primarily worked on a variety of constitutional law and telecommunications related matters, including cases before the U.S. Supreme Court bearing on national security, the death penalty, and the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Before Jenner, Olivier was the Marvin Karpatkin Fellow in the National Legal Office of the American Civil Liberties Union where he principally worked on civil rights and educational equity related matters.

Before attending law school, Olivier worked in publishing and film. He did his undergraduate studies at Williams College. He earned his law degree from the Georgetown University Law Center and has received an M. Phil from Columbia University.

2004 Cohort

Ian Steinberg
Ian Steinberg's research interests include the political economy of information and knowledge production. Specifically, he is interested in the roles knowledge and information play in creating, maintaining, and challenging systems of social stratification. Steinberg earned his B.A. at Penn State and M.A. at the University of Oregon. Before coming to Columbia he was a production manager at an academic press. He is an adjunct lecturer in Communication Arts at SUNY, Oneonta.

2005 Cohort

Daniel Lucas Graves
Lucas Graves’s research interests lie at the intersection of media technology, political communications, and news; a main question is the contention over potentially disruptive media forms and practices. As both reporter and analyst Lucas has covered media and technology for more than a decade, with a particular emphasis on digital music and movies, mobile devices and applications, and Latin American markets. He's worked for various publications and research firms, including Jupiter Research; today he writes regularly for Wired magazine. Lucas received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and an M.S. from Columbia's School of Journalism.

Danielle Haas
Danielle's interests include exploring international journalistic practices and reporting during the recent ‘Intifada’ its ramifications and how it compares to local reporting. She examines issues and struggles that are constantly at play for these journalists, the difficulties associated with personally living and experiencing one side of the conflict while seeking to maintain objectivity and professional sensitivity to the other, and the crucial bearing these issues have on understanding the media’s portrayal of the situation.

Benjamin Peters
Benjamin's dissertation "Reconstructing Information in Cold War Cybernetics and Social Sciences" examines how the concept of information became associated with computers in a cold war context. It looks to internationalize and rethink conventional narratives of how the digitization of communication technologies transforms social organization and regulation, with a special interest in Eastern Europe. A Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, he also holds an MA from Stanford University and a BA, magna cum laude, from Brigham Young University, and enjoys family life in Manhattan. Recent publications, working papers, and notes can be found here.

Zohar Kadmon Sella
Zohar Kadmon Sella is currently interested in mass-mediated terrorism, investigating the media presence of terrorism victims in their capacity as political pressure groups. Her paper “Terrorism Victims and the Media: Moral Authority as a Decisive Factor in Victims’ Media Treatment” won the 2006 New York State Communication Association Best Graduate Paper Award. Zohar is the former general counsel for the Israeli television network Keshet Broadcasting, Ltd. A graduate of the Tel Aviv University Law School, Zohar earned an MA in Media Studies from Stanford University and clerked for the Honorable Justice Theodore Or, Deputy Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court.

2006 Cohort

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
My work focus on participation in and through practices of communication. My dissertation research is ethnographic participant-observation focusing on the wider ramifications of political campaigns mobilizing people on a large scale to use personal contact as a form of political communication, working through things like canvassing and phone banking. I have also written on letters to the editor, blogging, and other formats of participatory communication. Abstractly, my interest can be parcelled out in the areas of social theory, political participation, and mediating institutions. My background includes jobs in administration, teaching, and editing, and studies at the University of Copenhagen (B.A., M.A.), University of Essex (MA), and the New School for Social Research (visiting student). More information can be found at rasmuskleisnielsen.net.

Ruth Palmer
Ruth Palmer’s research interests include the performing arts in the media, public perception of creative non-fiction, and ethics in journalism with emphasis on interviewing. She holds a B.A. in comparative literature from Bryn Mawr College. Before beginning her graduate studies she worked in the Artistic Department at the Metropolitan Opera.

2007 Cohort

Jonah Bossewitch
Jonah is a part-time doctoral candidate who also works full-time as a technical architect for Columbia's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL). He is investigating the politics of memory, surveillance, and transparency and their intersection with corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. Jonah has over a decade of experience as a professional software developer and is an active free software contributor. He completed an MA in Communication and Education at Teachers College (’07) and graduated from Princeton University (’97) with a BA Cum Laude in Philosophy and certificates in Computer Science and Cognitive Studies. He blogs at alchemicalmusings.org.

Katherine Brown
Katherine's research interests lie at the intersection of global and domestic public opinion, media, and U.S. foreign policy. Upon graduating with a B.A. in International Affairs from George Washington University in 2000, Katherine worked as a National Security Council public affairs assistant and as a Presidential Scheduling Coordinator at The White House. In 2001, she spent a year uncovering resources for medical missions in China, India, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam for the international charity Operation Smile. In 2002, Katherine returned to the NSC to serve as an assistant to the National Security Advisor and Deputy National Security Advisor before assuming a year-long role advising on communications and public events at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. Since 2005, she has worked as a Communications Manager for the San Francisco-based Asia Foundation, focusing on media-related issues in its Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan offices -- a role she maintains part time.

Annie Rudd
Annie Rudd is interested in the intersection of visuality and the news, the representational and aesthetic questions that the commingling of image and 'fact' invite, and the historical and cultural contingency of people's attitudes toward this interface. Much of her work to date has engaged with early photojournalism and social reform in New York City. She holds an Honours B.A. with high distinction from Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where she specialized in English Literature, Book and Media Studies, and American Studies. For the 2008-09 academic year, she works at Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library, processing archival collections as part of the Mellon-funded Graduate Student Internship Program.

2008 Cohort

Paul Cronin
Paul has a BA from Manchester University and an MSc from the London School of Economics. He spent several years working as a film-maker and writer before moving to New York to make a documentary about the student protests at Columbia University in 1968, a project that led him to the PhD program at the School of Journalism, where he continues to work on his film and explore a host of other interests. His other films include "Look out Haskell, it's real!", The Making of Medium Cool, Film as a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16, and In the Beginning was the Image: Conversations with Peter Whitehead. His publications include a book-length interview with German director Werner Herzog and an edition of British director and teacher Alexander Mackendrick's notes to his students entitled On Film-making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director. More details about all these projects can be found here.

Julia Sonnevend
Julia Sonnevend is a Ph.D. student in Communications at Columbia University, a Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University. She received her Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School, her Juris Doctorate and her Master of Arts degrees in German Studies and Aesthetics from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Sonnevend studies the intersections between communications, art history, visual studies and legal theory. Her research areas include visual culture theories, the theory of (digital) photography, critical communications studies, the canon of communications/media studies, visual representations of justice in art and media, law and performance, art and activism, cultural trauma, access to knowledge, law in the digitally-networked environment, global media policy, post-socialist identities and Eastern-European media. Her website can be found here.

Alumni

Reuben Abraham
Reuben is with Cornell University’s Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise at the Johnson School of Management and a visiting faculty member at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad. He is working with Cornell and the ISB to set up a Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise and a Base of the Pyramid Learning Lab in India. He also founded and runs the International Private Enterprise Group (IPEG), a New York-based network of professionals, which promotes the role of the private sector, capital markets and technology in catalyzing economic development in emerging markets.

Before coming to Cornell, he earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University. For his doctoral research, he looked at the relationship between telecommunications and economic development in developing countries. Specifically, he examined whether telecommunications services, by virtue of their role as carriers of information, reduced the information asymmetries inherent in unorganized markets (read the abstract of his dissertation). During his time at Columbia, he was an Associate Fellow in Global Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, and also a Fellow at the Public Policy Consortium. He was a Sloan Foundation/CITI Telecommunications Fellow in 2000.

Earlier, he was a co-founder of the RISC (Rural Infrastructure and Services Commons) project. RISC/Deeshaa aimed to correct rural market inefficiencies by providing a shared infrastructure platform for user services in a commercially sustainable way by aggregating rural demand and coordinating infrastructure services. During the past six years, he has worked at three Columbia University research centers, including the Earth Institute, the Columbia Institute of Tele-Information (CITI), a telecom research center at the Business School, and the Interactive Design Lab. In addition, he did a consulting stint at the World Bank, where he evaluated the economic impact of telecom on countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the Mercosur region, India, and China.

Reuben completed his M.A. and M.Phil from Columbia University. Before coming to Columbia, he finished a B.A. at Bombay University and a master’s degree in journalism at the Asian College of Journalism. He was co-founder of Just Another Magazine (J.A.M) and was later involved in another start-up in the telecommunications/content space. During his time in India, he was also a freelance writer, contributing to several leading newspapers.

If you have the time, feel free to head over to his personal blog, Zoo Station, or to the Indian Economy Blog, where he is a co-author. You can also e-mail him — nebuer@gmail.com

Christopher Anderson
Christopher Anderson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island-CUNY. In 2009-2010 he will also be a visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Internet and Society Program. Anderson’s research interests lie at the intersection of journalistic practices, new media technologies, and social and communications theory, broadly understood. His doctoral dissertation, Breaking Journalism Down: Work, Authority, and Networking Local News, 1997-2009 (2009), examined shifting forms of newswork and cross institutional journalistic collaboration in Philadelphia, Pa. His future research projects include studies of the relationship between changes in journalism and regulatory policy, analyses of new forms of journalism education, and the collaborations and confrontations between new media “geeks” and traditional journalists. At the College of Staten Island he teaches classes in both journalistic theory and practice, online news production, as well as media and communication class more generally.

Kristen Martin Daly
Kristen has decided to refer to herself as an “independent scholar” as she felt “not applicable” would be an unsatisfactory response for “profession” when coming through customs in international airports. Her dissertation, “Cinema 3.0: How Computer and Digital Technology is Changing Cinema” focuses on how the experience, production, distribution, exhibition, aesthetics, style, narrative and uses of cinema has changed in the contemporary environment of ubiquitous, digital media. Kristen has worked in independent film production, documentaries, human rights video advocacy and film festivals. Her short “I Heart NY State” is a finalist in the “I Love NY” short-film competition. Her interests are in art, media and international development. In a previous incarnation, she was an option specialist on the American Stock Exchange and has a Masters in mathematics from Stanford University. She is a runner, outdoor enthusiast and failed dog trainer to her two non-calm-submissive rescue dogs.

Gali Einav
In her current position as Director of Digital Technology Research at NBC Universal Gali overlooks consumer and market research on new digital and interactive technologies such as DVR, VOD, Mobile and Broadband Internet Previously, Gali worked at the Interactive Design Lab at Columbia University researching the role and content of interactive technologies. Her dissertation research looked at content and social implications of interactive television in the US and in the UK. It took both an historical and comparative look at the development of iTV and assessed possible community building via interactive content. Her paper "The Content Landscape of Internet Television" was published in "Television Over the Internet: Network Infrastructure and Content Implications". Gali has worked as a senior producer for the second TV channel in Israel and as a teacher of media studies at the New School of Communications in Tel-Aviv. She has a M.A. in Communications and Journalism from Hebrew University, Jerusalem and a Ph.D. in Communications from Columbia University.

Laura Forlano
Laura Forlano is a Kauffman Fellow in Law at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Her dissertation, "When Code Meets Place: Collaboration and Innovation at WiFi Hotspots," examined the local innovation practices of community wireless organizations and co-working groups. Forlano is an Adjunct Faculty member in the Design and Management department at Parsons and the Graduate Programs in International Affairs and Media Studies at The New School. She serves as a board member of NYCwireless and the New York City Computer Human Interaction Association. Forlano received a Master's in International Affairs from Columbia University, a Diploma in International Relations from The Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelor's in Asian Studies from Skidmore College.

Sangoak Lee
Sangoak Lee's research interests center on the globalization of the media and telecommunications industries, with geographic emphasis on Asia. Before joining the doctoral program, he was an international marketing manager at the Korea International Broadcasting Foundation, a Korean television service for global viewers. He also worked as strategic planner at Samsung Entertainment Group after receiving a master's degree in Telecommunication in 1995 from Michigan State University. He published three articles on media economics and policy while he was working in the industry. The most recent one was "Satellite Television Broadcasting in Asia-Pacific Markets," published on the Spring 2000 newsletter of The Asia Pacific Satellite Communications Council.

Jeff Pooley
Jeff Pooley (Harvard College B.A., social studies; Columbia University M.A., Ph.D., communications) is Assistant Professor of Media and Communication at Muhlenberg College. His research centers on the history of communication studies, as the field's emergence has intersected with the twentieth century rise of the other social sciences. He also writes about celebrity, the consumer culture and media policy.

Pooley’s dissertation (“An Accident of Memory: Edward Shils, Paul Lazarsfeld and the History of American Mass Communication Research,” May 2006 “with distinction”) traces the rise of a standard disciplinary memory for communication studies, a storyline that helped to legitimate the infant social scientific field in the 1950s and 1960s. Pooley’s ongoing work in the history of communication studies includes a study of Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld’s Personal Influence (“Fifteen Pages That Shook the Field”, Annals 2006), a treatment of Edward Shils’ wartime revision of his social thought (under review, American Sociologist), a survey and assessment of the recent wave of revisionist history of communication research (forthcoming chapter in J. Pooley & D. Park (eds.), Media Research and Its Histories: New Perspectives on the Contested Memory of the Field (Peter Lang)), a treatment of the 1990s Marshall McLuhan revival (to be submitted), and a study of James W. Carey’s thought.

Pooley recently created an online, searchable bibliography of published work on the history of communication studies.

Petra Sonderegger
Petra Sonderegger's research focuses on changes in innovative collaboration across large distances as people increasingly use telecommunications, such as e-mail, teleconferencing and webmeetings. She is interested in discovering how this affects the geographical distribution of innovation networks. Before coming to Columbia, Petra was a team leader and project manager for the idea factory BrainStore. She previously worked in management training and management development for the Swiss Post and Swisscom. Petra has a graduate degree in business management from the University of Bern, Switzerland.