Directors
Professor, Communication Studies
Charles R. Acland is the author of Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence and coeditor, with Haidee Wasson, of Useful Cinema. He is co-director of Project Arclight, with Eric Hoyt
Associate Professor, History
Elena Razlogova specializes in the cultural history of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. She is the author of The Listener's Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (2011) and co-editor of “Radical Histories in Digital Culture” issue of the Radical History Review (2013). She has published articles and book chapters on U.S. radio history, music recommendation algorithms, and film translation in the Soviet Union. She was an executive producer on the digital project Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives. She is currently working on several projects: a history of simultaneous film translation and transnational networks at Soviet film festivals; a history of WFMU’s transition from a offbeat New York area radio station to a leader in the free online music movement; and a history of the morality of snitching in the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Faculty Members
Professor, Communication Studies
Charles R. Acland is co-director of the Media History Research Centre. He is the author of Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence and coeditor, with Haidee Wasson, of Useful Cinema. He is co-director of Project Arclight, with Eric Hoyt
Professor Emeritus, Communication Studies, Concordia University
William Buxton has received a Rhodes Scholarship, two DAAD (German Exchange) Fellowships, a Shastri (Canada-India) Fellowship, and was scholar-in-residence at the Rockefeller Archive Center. He has taught at Laurentian University, University of New Brunswick, Simon Fraser University, and Concordia University (since 1990).
Associate Professor, Cinema Studies, Concordia University Luca Caminati's research deals with post-colonial theory and orientalist discourses in post-WWII Italian cinema and media, with a specific interest in non-fiction film and media arts. In 2009-2010 he was the recipient of the Paul Mellon/National Endowments for the Humanities "Rome Prize", a residential fellowship awarded by the American Academy in Rome. His current SSHRC-funded project, titled Traveling Auteurs: the Geopolitical Afterlife of Postwar Italian Art Cinema, investigates the "Third World" documentary films of Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Bernardo Bertolucci. He is currently serving as associate editor for the journal Italica.concordia.academia.edu/LucaCaminati
Professor, Communication Studies Monika Kin Gagnon is author of Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (2000), 13 Conversations about Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002) with Richard Fung, and co-editor of Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (2014) with Janine Marchessault. In Search of Expo 67 (with Lesley Johnstone) is forthcoming in 2019.
Associate Professor, Communication Studies
Fenwick McKelvey's work has appeared in numerous journals, including Television and New Media, the International Journal of Communication, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, the Canadian Journal of Communication, Global Media Journal, and the Journal of Information Technology and Politics. He is coauthor of The Permanent Campaign: New Media, New Politics. His book Media Daemons is currently under contract with the University of Minnesota Press.
Professor, French, Concordia University
Assistant Professor, Cinema Joshua Neves is Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair at Concordia University, where he teaches in the Program in Film and Moving Image Studies and is the Director of the Global Emergent Media (GEM) Lab (https://www.globalemergentmedia.com/). His research focuses on digital media, cultural and political theory, and problems of development and legitimacy, with a particular focus Asia and the Global South. He current book project, tentatively titled Smart Bodies, examines the mainstreaming of performance enhancing technologies—smart drugs to smartphones—paying close attention to changing bodily capacities and new demands for hyperbolic performance. He is the co-editor (with Bhaskar Sarkar) of Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (Duke University Press, 2017) and his monograph, Faking Globalization: Beijing’s Digital Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy, is forthcoming from Duke in 2019. His work has also appeared or Social Text, Discourse, Film Quarterly, Sarai, Cinema Journal, The Media Fields Journal, Rethinking Chinese Television, A Companion to Documentary Film History, among others.
Professor, Film Studies, Concordia University Catherine Russell is Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She is the author of five books, including Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (1999), and Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices (2018). She has published articles on experimental film, Japanese film, and Hollywood cinema in Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, Criticism, Visual Anthropology, Scope, Transformations, Framework, and she is a contributing writer for Cineaste Magazine. catherinerussell.ca
Associate Professor, Cinema, Concordia University
Associate Professor, Film Studies, Concordia University Marc Steinberg is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University. He is the author of Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) and its Japanese expanded version Why is Japan a “Media Mixing Nation”? (Naze Nihon wa “media mikkusu suru kuni” nano ka) (Tokyo: Kadokawa, 2015). He is the co-editor of Media Theory in Japan (Duke University Press, 2017), and co-editor of a special issue of Asiascape: Digital Asia on “Regional Platforms.” His book, The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Commercial Internet is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press in 2019.
Professor, Communication Studies, Concordia University van Wyck is working on a number of projects related to his new monograph, The Angel Turns: Memos for the End of the Holocene. This work completes a trilogy of nuclear-themed books, beginning with Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma and Nuclear Threat in 2005, followed by the Highway of the Atom in 2010. At the moment he is working to understand the technical apparatus involved with the historical use of the cloud chamber to photograph radioactive decay; the (perhaps apocryphal) pre-history of photography in the figure of keraunography; the use of uranium in early colour photography; and the use of Lycopodium sp. (Ground Pine) in early flash photography.
Haidee Wasson's published work concentrates on cinema, but explores the broader relations among moving images, technology, art, and culture. Her recent work focuses on film technologies, with a particular interest in the ways that the museum, industry, and the military have provided platforms for new ideas about, and uses of, cinema. Her current project specifically examines the history portable projectors and their importance for expanding what films look like, how they are seen and used, and why we watch them. She lectures internationally on these and other subjects.
Associate Professor, English
Darren Wershler is the Concordia University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature and Co-Director of the Media History Research Centre. He is currently writing THE LAB BOOK: Situated Practices in Media Studies (with Jussi Parikka and Lori Emerson), and a book on Minecraft (with Bart Simon).
Affiliate Members
Professor, Communication and Art History, McGill University
Darin Barney is the Grierson Chair in Communication Studies at McGill University. He is the author of several scholarly works, including One Nation Under Google: Citizenship in the Technological Republic (2007 Hart House Lecture); Communication Technology: The Canadian Democratic Audit (UBC Press: 2005); The Network Society (Polity Press: 2004); and Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology (University of Chicago Press 2000). He is co-editor of several books and journal editions, including The Participatory Condition (University of Minnesota Press: 2016, with Coleman, Ross, Sterne and Tembeck). Barney’s current research focuses on materialist approaches to media and communication, infrastructure and radical politics.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Université de Montréal, Michael Nardone is an FRQSC postdoctoral fellow in the Département des littératures de langue française at the Université de Montréal, where he works with the research group of the Canada Research Chair in Digital Textualities. The author of two books of poetry – THE RITUALITES (2018) and TRANSACTION RECORD (2014) – he is also managing editor of AMODERN, an open access scholarly journal dedicated to media, culture, and poetics. Nardone's research focuses on the intersection of poetics and media historical methodologies within the overlapping fields of literature, media, performance, and sound. His writings, dialogues, and editorial projects have been published widely and are archived at http://soundobject.net.
Associate Professor, Université du Québec à Montréal
Katharina Niemeyer studied European media culture (Bauhaus Universität Weimar, Université Lyon 2) and received a PhD in social and economic sciences from the University of Geneva, Switzerland with a thesis on television news, historiography and memory. Her research focuses mainly on media and their relations to memory, history and nostalgia. After having edited the volume Media and Nostalgia. Yearning for the past, present and future in 2014 (Palgrave Macmillan), Katharina Niemeyer co-founded the International Media and Nostalgia Network. She is member of the editorial board of the Memory Studies journal and council member of the International Association for Media and History. www.kniemeyer.net
Professor and William Dawson Scholar, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, McGill University.
Andrew Piper directs .txtLAB, a digital humanities laboratory at McGill, and is editor of the new web-based, open-access journal, CA: Journal of Cultural Analytics. His work focuses on applying the tools and techniques of data science to the study of literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on questions of cultural capital, institutional prestige, and intellectual diversity.
Associate Professor,
William Dawson Scholar of Feminist Media Studies, McGill University
Carrie Rentschler’s research examines the relationship between media making, social movement activism, and the construction of new political subjectivities. She studies this relationship in the context of movements against gender and racial violence, experiences of victimization and social trauma, and structures of feminist organizing online and via social media. She is author of Second Wounds: Victims’ Rights and the Media in the U.S. and co-editor of Girlhood and the Politics of Place
carrierentschler.org.
Associate Professor, Communication and Art History, McGill University
Jonathan Sterne is the James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012). His new projects consider instruments and instrumentalities; mail by cruise missile; and the intersections of disability, technology and perception. sterneworks.org.
Professor, Communication and Art History, McGill University
Will Straw is the author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 1950s America, and the editor of numerous volumes, including Circulation and the City (with Alex Boutros), and Formes urbaines (with Anouk Bélanger and Annie Gérin). His current research focuses on the place of media within the 24-hour daily cycle, networks of production and circulation within fan cultures and media treatments of crime.
Associate professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of Montreal Ghislain Thibault is an Associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Montreal. He received his PhD in 2010 from the Université de Montréal before pursuing postdoctoral work at Harvard University. Appointed as an Assistant professor at the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2011, he later joined the Université de Montréal in 2015. His current research project explores the conceptual and historical relationships between machines and media in mid twentieth-century theories. His recent work in the cultural and material history of media and on the history of technology has appeared in journals such as Canadian Literature and the Canadian Journal of Communication, Configurations and VIEW.
Associate Professor,
Dominique Trudel holds a PhD in Communication Studies from the Université de Montréal and has completed a FQRSC-funded post-doctoral research project at New York University. Before joining Concordia University, Dominique was a researcher at the CNRS’ Institut des sciences de la communication (ISCC-CNRS) in Paris. His work has appeared in journals such as the International Journal of Communication, the Canadian Journal of Communication, Communiquer, the International Journal of Zizek Studies, and Communication.
Assistant Professor, McGill
Theodora Vardouli holds a PhD in Design and Computation from the MIT Department of Architecture, with a minor in Science and Technology Studies. She received a Master in Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens, where she also earned a postgraduate diploma in Design-Space-Culture. As assistant professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University, Vardouli examines algorithmic techniques for representing and generating architectural space and form, their cultural meanings, historically and in present, and their operational implications for creative design. Her historical scholarship, supported from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, spearheads a decentered and transactional history of architectural computation: decentered because it moves the focus away from the computer as a technological instrument and toward particular technical languages, along with the institutional and intellectual contexts in which these were developed; and transactional because it positions these technical languages at the interstices of multiple disciplines and research settings. Vardouli's pedagogical experiments include performing algorithms for representing and generating form by hand so as to become aware of, and exploit, conflicts between perceptual shape and its symbolic computational abstractions. Her upcoming project is a design research laboratory aimed at developing critical projects and artistic interventions that communicate the inner workings and lineages of common architecture software applications and fostering imagination of novel relationships between architecture and computation. Vardouli is co-editor of Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground 1945-1980 (2019, Routledge Research in Design, Technology, and Society Series), a collection of essays from architectural historians, science and technology scholars and media studies scholars, that rethinks the history and historiography of architecture and the computer.
Student Members
MHRC Members