Faculty Now: Fall 2021

Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design

• Instructor Pablo Ampuero joined the faculty in the fall of 2020. A 20-year veteran of the advertising industry, Ampuero specializes in copywriting and portfolio courses within the APRD creative track. He’s also the faculty liaison for Ad Club.
• Instructor Trina Arnett works with small agencies to implement and leverage analytics for their clients. She’s also working with local non-profits that share their data with her students to give them real-life analytics and data visualization purposes.
• Senior Instructor Melinda Cheval will retire in May 2022 after 23 years at CU Boulder. During her time at the university, she has been fortunate to meet many amazing students and industry professionals. Let her know if you would like to Zoom into her fall or spring classes.
• Instructor Dawn Doty served as a judge for the prestigious PRSA Silver Anvil awards and the PRSSA Bateman Case Study Competition. She was recently named PRSA’s 2021 Outstanding Educator of the Year.
• Assistant Professor Jolene Fisher published four peer-reviewed journal articles and two book chapters in the last year, continuing her work on digital games as strategic communication tools and issues of trust and political knowledge. She also submitted a grant proposal to the Trans-Atlantic Platform call as part of a team of international researchers studying games and community resilience.
• Associate Professor Harsha Gangadharbatla was elected the president of the American Academy of Advertising. He also served as the research chair of the Advertising Division at AEJMC.
• Associate Professor of Advertising Glenn Griffin recently co-wrote a study titled “Brand Imitation Strategy, Package Design and Consumer Response: What Does It Take to Make a Difference?” that was published in the Journal of Product & Brand Management.
• Associate Professor Toby Hopp published scholarly articles on social media-based misinformation and disinformation, uncivil political communication, online news use and organizational transparency. He also co-directed CU’s Education Abroad program in Paris.
• Instructor of Technology Joseph Labrecque published a new book on creative motion design titled Mastering Adobe Animate 2021. Last summer, he produced a variety of multimedia works as personal projects and alongside design and art faculty from around the world. He has recently spoken at events and conducted workshops for AIGA, HowToTea.ch and the Adobe Education Leader Summit.
• Professor Seow Ting Lee’s recent publications focused on a range of strategic and health communication contexts, including COVID-19 messaging, health disparities, nation branding, gastrodiplomacy and the role of health orientation in physical exercise behavior. Her journal articles are the first to operationalize the constructs of “pandemic public diplomacy” and “COVID-19 vaccine diplomacy.” She’s working on new projects in Ghana and Singapore.
• Instructor Dan Ligon’s research on the difference between an idea and a concept was accepted into the Design Principles & Practices conference at the Pratt Institute in 2020. Additionally, he is the  AIGA faculty representative for CU Boulder and was the faculty representative for Design Club, a student organization, as the team carried on under COVID-19.
• Associate Professor Kelty Logan has been researching the “privacy paradox,” exploring how consumers weigh the benefits versus personal data exposure when engaging with advertising on social media. In 2021, her papers “’Should I Post or Ghost?’: Examining How Privacy Concerns Impact Social Media Engagement in US Consumers” and “It’s Complicated: Exploring the Social Media Privacy Paradox in the United States” were accepted for publication by the Journal of Psychology & Marketing and the Journal of Data Protection and Privacy, respectively.
• Scholar in Residence David Nottoli joined the department this fall. He is an award-winning advertising strategist who has worked with brands including Hershey, Nike, Levi’s, Coca-Cola, Samsung, Best Buy and Bank of America.
• Assistant Professor Erin Schauster continues to track the moral psychology of media professionals using experiments, surveys and life story interviews in articles that have been published in the Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Media Ethics and Journalism & Mass Communication Educator.
• Associate Professor David Slayden is the director of the professional master’s degree in strategic communication. Students in the project-based program choose an emphasis in either brand design or experience design.
• Professor Krishnamurthy Sriramesh’s co-edited book, The Global Public Relations Handbook: Theory, Research, and Practice, was published in 2020 and also received the 2020 PRIDE Award from the National Communication Association. He’s an organizer of the International Public Relations Symposium in Lake Bled, Slovenia, and was invited to deliver a keynote marking 100 years of journalism and media education in South Asia.
• Professor Burton St. John received a de Castro grant for his study––co-developed with PhD student Danielle Quichocho––on how media consumers perceive the credibility of corporate-social advocacy messages in the news media. He is also the co-editor of two books slated for late 2021 publication by Routledge: The Global Foundations of Public Relations: Humanism, China & the West and Communicating Climate Change: Making Environmental Messaging Accessible. In 2021, he became the director of the master’s program in corporate communication.
• Instructor Parisa Tashakori received international awards from different design festivals. She was the keynote speaker and member of the jury for numerous design competitions, and she has organized various cultural projects and workshops around the world. With over 20 years of experience in design, she’s been an art director, curator, designer, activist and artist.
• Associate Professor Chris Vargo recently earned tenure and was promoted. He also incorporated the university-owned startup socialcontext.ai—a contextual advertising and brand safety solution for the programmatic advertising ecosystem.
• Professor C. Kay Weaver joined CMCI as the new chair of APRD after serving as dean of the School of Graduate Research at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. This year, she co-wrote a book chapter on best practice communication advisor/advisee working relationships and wrote a chapter on power and control in public relations. She is co-editing the Routledge Companion to Public Relations.
• Associate Professor Erin Willis’ research examines the ways in which health messages influence people’s behaviors. She recently co-wrote a winning Page Center scholar grant to study how pharmaceutical companies use influencers to promote prescription drugs.

Communication

• Associate Professor John Ackerman studies the rhetoric of public space, which considers how the built environment, collective memory and institutional policies configure our cities and neighborhoods. In 2020, The Review of Communication published his essay, “The unbuilt city of Reno,” based on his plenary address at the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Project in Power, Place, and Publics at the University of Nevada, Reno.
• Professor Karen Lee Ashcraft became an ICA Fellow and received the 2020 Fredric M. Jablin Award for Outstanding Contributions to Organizational Communication from ICA.
• Associate Professor David Boromisza-Habashi published a textbook that teaches undergraduate students to think about intercultural communication as a practical challenge and to find ways to coordinate their interactions with different cultures. He continued his collaborative research on how the U.S.-style of public speaking found its way into the curriculum at a Chinese university.
• Assistant Professor Joëlle Cruz started a new international research project on the intersections of organizational communication, environmental communication and ecofeminisms. She received a CHA Small Humanities grant to investigate the case of women organizing around plastic waste recycling in Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa.
• Professor Lisa Flores began her appointment as associate dean of diversity, equity and inclusion and was named co-chair of the campus IDEA Council. She received the Rhetoric Society of America book award for her book Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the ‘Illegal’ Immigrant (Penn State University Press, 2020). In 2021, she earned the NCA’s Charles H. Woolbert Research Award, Diamond Anniversary Book Award, James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, and its inaugural IDEA Scholarship Award.
• Associate Professor Laurie Gries published the chapter “Advances in Visual Rhetorical Analysis” in The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods in 2020. She also published “(Re)designing Innovation Alley: fostering civic living and learning through visual rhetoric and urban design” and “New Materialist Ontobiography: A Critical-Creative Approach for Coping and Caring in the Chthulucene” in Communication Review and College English, respectively.
• Senior Instructor Ruth Hickerson led another successful year as faculty director of Pathways to Excellence, CMCI’s summer bridge program. This session was particularly rewarding as students were able to return to campus thanks to a reduced cohort size that carefully followed social distancing protocols. She is now collaborating with communication colleagues and the USDA Forest Service on research that explores harassment and discrimination experiences among wildland firefighters.
• Assistant Professor Danielle Hodge delivered the 2021 Juneteenth keynote, “Liberatory Love and Freedom: Radical Reenvisionings,” for the CU System. Additionally, she participated in a critical conversations series hosted by Florida Atlantic University, discussing the impact of hip-hop on classrooms and communities. She also led a workshop on critical race pedagogy for CMCI’s Inclusive Pedagogy series and developed a course on race, anti-Black racism and communication.
• Associate Professor Jody Jahn was recently granted tenure and promoted. She co-chaired a research track on sustainability-related communication for the 2021 International Sustainability Development Research Conference hosted by Mid Sweden University.
• Associate Professor Matthew Koschmann received a CU Financial Futures grant to enhance the Group Communication Wildfire Simulation and produce an animation video about his research on organizational communication. He is co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation grant, studying housing reconstruction in the Philippines following natural disasters. He also works with the United Nations studying diaspora communication strategies.
• Professor Tim Kuhn is beginning his second year as the Department of Communication chair and has gained even more respect for the department’s staff, faculty and students during the pandemic. He is also chair of the Organizational Communication Division of the International Communication Association and recently finished co-editing the Handbook of the Communicative Constitution of Organization, to be released in 2021.
• Instructor Christy Maurer continues to develop and expand the Department of Communication’s online course offerings for Continuing Education, providing former students an opportunity to return and earn their communication degrees through the CU Complete program. She also helps introduce undergraduate learning assistants to the department and supports online learning throughout the department.
• Senior Instructor Jeff Motter worked with undergraduate students to organize the TEDxCU event, Bounce. His co-written book, Rooted Resistance: The Rhetorical Struggle for Agrarian Place in Modern American Culture, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in September 2020.
• Associate Professor Phaedra Pezzullo published a co-edited volume, Green Communication and China: On Crisis, Care, and Global Futures (MSU Press), and the sixth edition of her co-written textbook, Environmental Communication & the Public Sphere (Sage), with over 250 new citations and over 50 new keywords. She also helped establish a new campus center on Creative Climate Communication and Behavior Change (C3BC).
• Assistant Professor Natasha Shrikant analyzes racial, ethnic and cultural identity negotiation and ways that racism occurs in everyday conversation. Her work appears in academic journals and on podcasts, and she is working on a collaborative project interrogating whiteness in discourse analytic research through the organization Ethnomethodology/Conversation Analysis for Racial Justice.
• Professor Pete Simonson spent the past academic year on sabbatical, working on several essays and a book on the history and theory of rhetoric since the late 19th century. He’s also the co-editor of a new international journal, History of Media Studies. He recently organized a virtual pre-conference on the subject with Spanish-English interpretation and significant participation from scholars in Latin America and Spain.
• Senior Instructor Jamie Skerski was named the inaugural director of the Josephine Jones Speaking Lab, a new space committed to elevating CMCI student voices in the classroom and community. The lab will offer speech coaching, communication workshops and guest speakers. She is also the department’s associate chair.
• Associate Professor Leah Sprain is analyzing energy democracy in Boulder as the city continues to work toward climate change goals. With international collaborators, she’s developing practical theory to guide classroom instruction of difficult data.
• Professor Bryan Taylor leaned into the pandemic as a teaching opportunity, revising his undergraduate seminar offerings in organizational culture and security studies to focus on COVID-related challenges and opportunities for collaboration, decision-making and leadership. He published an essay on deepfake, edited a forthcoming journal forum on ethnography in organizational communication and is working on an essay about nuclear hotline communication.
• Associate Professor Cindy White serves as CMCI’s associate dean for undergraduate curriculum. Her work in that role focuses on student success and retention. Her research on communication between college students and parents about money and purchasing explores how such interactions impact relationships and convey family values.

Critical Media Practices

• Associate Professor Reece Auguiste studies the historical formation of screen cultures and their emergence and evolution in transnational contexts. In 2020, he chaired the session “Talking About History in Fiction and Fiction in History” at the Reframing Africa 2020 workshop and was a panelist on the webinar “Co-Creation in Documentary During Pandemic and Protest” hosted by Ithaca College.
• Assistant Professor Betsey Biggs is composing vocal and electronic music for her film-music project, Melt: The Memory of Ice. She’s also collaborating with Assistant Professor August Black on an audiovisual internet project, “We Are Here FM.” Her chamber composition, Teewinot, was released on the album Dawn Chorus (Innova Recordings) last year.
• Assistant Professor August Black finished his first year at CU. In summer 2021, he performed live with his own custom teleconferencing software on Austrian National Radio, had a 10-day residency at Wave Farm in Acra, New York, and released a new web project in collaboration with Assistant Professor Betsey Biggs.
• Senior Instructor Pat Clark is designing and installing a mixed reality studio as part of CMCI’s Immersive Media Lab. This platform is designed to help students and faculty capture new perspectives as users interact with virtual reality experiences. He’s also in postproduction for his latest film, Small Turns Big, created from thousands of microscopy images and videos.
• Instructor Eric Coombs Esmail, director of the Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media, and Senior Instructor Christian Hammons wrapped production on their documentary feature American Refuge and oversaw the second annual Mimesis Documentary Festival, which featured more than 80 projects, artists Lynne Sachs and Pedro Costa, and a new installment of Flaherty x Boulder.
• Associate Professor Erin Espelie is co-faculty director of the Nature, Environment, Science and Technology Studio for the Arts (NEST). In 2020, her film Inside the Shared Life was featured in “Sympoiesis,” an online symposium at the Transart Institute, and her article on time and eco-cinema was published in the journal Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. She also organized an environmental futures project alongside Assistant Professor Brianne Cohen with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
• Senior Instructor Christian Hammons and Instructor Eric Coombs Esmail wrapped production on their documentary feature, American Refuge, and oversaw the second annual Mimesis Documentary Festival, which featured more than 80 projects, artists Lynne Sachs and Pedro Costa, and a new installment of Flaherty x Boulder.
• Associate Professor Tara Knight is a co-investigator of NEST, which explores the interrelation, generative overlaps and productive differences between arts-based and science-based disciplines. In May 2021, she moderated the online discussion “Scope of the Natural Round Table” with artist Amy Hoagland and social psychologist Jennifer Cole, sponsored by NEST and the Arbor Institute.
• Associate Professor Tomas Laurenzo joined the department in fall 2021. He is an artist, engineer, academic and designer working with physical and digital media. Laurenzo is interested in data representation, music, interaction and politics.
• Professor Teri Rueb continued her role as department chair. She was featured in a chapter interview in The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art in 2020 and is developing a mobile app sonification experience to elaborate on the scaled solar system with the Fiske Planetarium. The piece, Wanderers, will premiere in November 2021 as part of a special event and gala. Her ongoing collaboration with electrical engineer and acoustics researcher David Anderson yielded two recent installations: The Spark in 2020 and Arbor Institute in 2021.
• Instructor Jason Sanford resumed performing live music in front of an audience with his self-made electronic and sculptural musical instruments in June 2021. He recorded a new EP during the summer and is confirming dates for a European tour in summer 2022.
• Associate Professor Roshanna P. Sylvester is a historian of childhood in the early space age. Her research project, A Sky Full of Stars, features letters by Soviet and American children to the first astronauts and cosmonauts. Her piece on girls’ letters to John Glenn recently appeared in The Conversation, and she was a guest expert on Saturnae, a space-themed live-stream, interactive concert series.
• Associate Professor Thorsten Trimpop joined the department in fall 2020. A filmmaker and visual artist, his work examines the impact of history, politics and the changing natural world on private lives. His latest film, Furusato, is a human-scale portrait of a small town in Japan’s nuclear exclusion zone. It was shown at dozens of festivals and won the grand prize at DOK Leipzig.
• Instructor Andrew Young presented his research on Rwandan thanatourism at the 2021 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference. He also completed his web-based documentary, Disavowed, and published an article discussing it in Games and Culture. In addition, he completed an interactive sound piece, Always (Win-PC), and published an article discussing film noir and exile cinema in the Journal of Popular Film and Culture.

Information Science

• Associate Professor Lecia Barker works with the National Center for Women & IT to ensure that the perspectives of those who identify as women—at the intersections of gender identity, race, ethnicity, class, age, sexual orientation and ability status—are meaningfully represented in computer and information sciences. She studies social settings that shape the perceptions and choices of women to understand how to counteract negative influences.
• Assistant Professor Jed Brubaker was awarded a $549,985 CAREER grant from the NSF, given to faculty in the early phases of their careers. His research team will work with terminally ill patients and their families to develop best practices and tools for people engaged in end-of-life planning while creating guidelines and frameworks for technologists to enable technology to support those plans.
• Professor Robin Burke served as department chair. He and his students study recommender systems and other personalized information systems in e-commerce, social media and streaming platforms, with the aim of improving their ability to serve multiple stakeholders, deliver fair and diverse outcomes, and provide transparency to end-users and others.
• Assistant Professor Laura Devendorf is creating a series of woven fabrics and design tools that integrate craft and technology. Students in her Unstable Design Lab are creating techniques to engage personal data and programs for recycling textiles with embedded circuitry. She was recently featured in a Washington Post article on tech companies’ development of smart textiles.
• Assistant Professor Casey Fiesler and her students in the Internet Rules Lab are conducting research related to technology ethics, ethics education and empowering marginalized communities online. In 2021, she began work related to her NSF CAREER grant on speculative ethics for technology design.
• Instructor Abe Handler defended his dissertation in computer science in April 2021 and joined CMCI’s faculty in fall 2020. Before starting graduate school, he worked as a software developer and data journalist. He is interested in natural language processing, data science and human-computer interaction.
• Assistant Professor Brian Keegan recruited two new PhD students to advance human-centered data science research around tech-worker organizing and infrastructural harm. Keegan also launched a collaboration with Leafly to apply data science methods to large-scale cannabis datasets and won a grant to explore how explainable AI systems could help CU Boulder facilities management improve predictive maintenance operations.
• Professor Leysia Palen researches multiple topics and hazards in the area of crisis informatics. Beginning in 2020, she has focused on issues of vaccine compliance and vaccine disinformation campaigns during the pandemic, particularly as a function of race in the U.S. She and her students partner with NCAR and NOAA, and are funded by the NSF.
• Assistant Professor Ricarose Roque, who directs the Creative Communities research group, was awarded a $2.3 million grant from the NSF along with collaborators from the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium and the Lifelong Kindergarten at MIT. The project team will design and study equitable learning experiences for youth and families to code in informal learning spaces such as museums, libraries and community centers.
• Associate Professor Bryan Semaan explores the role of technology in enabling resilience among marginalized people. He and his students are working to decolonize technology and create sociotechnical systems that embody the values of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion.
• Associate Professor Amy Voida studies the role of data and technology in the nonprofit sector. Her research explores the ways ideological polarization and disinformation influence the use of data and technology in advocacy and fundraising work.
• Assistant Professor Stephen Voida was awarded a Renée Crown Wellness Institute seed grant supporting his research on the design of health technologies to help people manage chronic mental health conditions. His app enables patients to “co-track” symptoms with trusted members of their care networks. He and his students are studying the real-world use of the system prototype.
• Instructor Jason Zietz is interested in teaching various aspects of computing and how computational systems can be designed to support personal and societal well-being.

Journalism

• Associate Professor Angie Chuang’s literary-journalism piece “The Other Child” appeared in the latest issue of The Asian American Literary Review. In October, she published the essay “Scars, Silence, and Dian Fossey,” in a University of Nebraska anthology of the lyric essay, and a chapter in the book Teaching Race: Struggles, Strategies, and Scholarship for the Mass Communication Classroom (Rowman & Littlefield).
• Senior Instructor Paul Daugherty led students in NewsTeam Boulder to win the Best Student Production Newscast award in the 35th Annual Heartland Regional Emmys. Two more wins in the Student Production Multimedia Journalist category were awarded to NewsTeam students advised by co-instructor and Media Production and Technology Manager Emilie Johnson. Daugherty and Johnson innovated new production and studio workflows for producing the newscast during COVID-19 restrictions.
• Instructor Marina Dmukhovskaya became the director of CMCI’s sports media minor. She covered the Tokyo 2020 Olympics remotely from Berlin, Germany, for the Olympic Channel, the platform of the International Olympic Committee. She covered the Games virtually for the first time with colleagues from Japan, Russia, Spain, Brazil and South Korea. In August 2021, she started her faculty-in-residence position with CMCI first-year students at Buckingham Hall.
• Associate Professor Pat Ferrucci’s first book, Making Nonprofit News, came out in 2020. He’s researching how new market models of journalism affect professional practice, specifically by expanding journalism boundaries. He’s also working with Scott Eldridge from the University of Groningen on an edited volume, The Institutions Changing Journalism: Barbarians Inside the Gate, scheduled for release in 2022.
• Associate Professor Hun Shik Kim recently completed two studies on South Korea’s electoral TV debates and investigative journalism during political transitions. Data from one of the studies will be published in an edited book this fall. He also published journal articles on public diplomacy in the Donald Trump-Kim Jong Un summit in Singapore and on media coverage and nation-branding of South Korea’s COVID-19 pandemic mitigation efforts.
• Assistant Professor Christine Larson studies how digital technologies change book publishing, journalism and other cultural industries. Her forthcoming book, Writing the Romance: Women, Words and Power in the Digital Economy, explains how romance writers created a professional network that allowed them to pioneer digital publishing while fomenting a long-overdue cultural reckoning in publishing.
• Professor Michael McDevitt is the author of Where Ideas Go to Die: The Fate of Intellect in American Journalism, published in 2020 (Oxford). He is now editing “Media and the Future of Democracy,” a special issue of Mass Communication and Society.
• Instructor Chuck Plunkett’s story was featured in News Matters, a documentary that debuted on Rocky Mountain PBS during the 2021 spring semester, highlighting issues facing local newsrooms. He is also director of CU News Corps and continues to work on a creative project that investigates white Evangelical Southern culture during the first two decades of this century.
• Instructor Hillary Rosner is the assistant director of the Center for Environmental Journalism. She is at work on a book about land-use change and how we can reconnect the planet for other species. It will be published by Patagonia in 2023.
• Associate Professor Kathleen M. Ryan’s 2020 NEH-funded interactive documentary Homefront Heroines: The WAVES of World War II was honored with awards of excellence by the Broadcast Education Association and the Popular Culture Association. She published Pin Up! The Subculture in December 2020 and released her second i-doc, Pin Up! The Movie: An Interactive Documentary, in January 2021.
• Associate Professor Elizabeth Skewes continued to serve as the Department of Journalism chair and recently completed a two-year stint as interim chair of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design. She and doctoral candidate Katie Alaimo are conducting research for their book on media coverage of mass shootings, which was selected last year for a contract by AEJMC and Peter Lang Publishing through the competitive Scholarsourcing project.
• Assistant Professor Ross Taylor worked on a documentary photo essay and feature-length film in Denver’s refugee community. He was commissioned for two portraits of Olympic athletes and continues to serve on the National Press Photographers Association Board of Directors. A portrait of his was selected by PBS for the photographic book American Portrait.
• Professor Tom Yulsman wrote about 40 stories for his column in Discover, a science magazine, and a short feature on the largest Arctic science expedition. A forthcoming story examines whether the era of climate denialism is over. As director of the Center for Environmental Journalism, Yulsman oversaw The Water Desk, which received a two-year, $600,000 grant to support journalism on Western water issues.

Media Studies

• Associate Professor Shu-Ling Chen Berggreen conducts research and teaches in the areas of children and media, media and identity politics, media and globalization, media institutions and economics in the U.S. and in Asia, and methodological issues in media research. She is continuing her research into media’s mythic storytelling in the conceptualization and commodification of tea.
• Professor Andrew Calabrese, associate dean for graduate programs and research, taught a graduate course on Media, Culture and Food Politics. He’s participating in a USDA grant to produce media promoting the local cultivation and culinary uses of grains—the subject of a documentary film he’s producing. He serves on the boards of the Flatirons Food Film Festival and the Colorado Grain Chain, and he’s co-organizing an international research conference on food and communication in 2021.
• Associate Professor Nabil Echchaibi won the Best Faculty Paper award at the 2021 International Communication Association. He gave a keynote lecture at Butler University titled “Muslims Between the Blackmail of Transparency and the Right to Opacity,” and his co-edited book, Media and Religion: the Global View, is out this year with De Gruyter. He is the associate director of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture (CMRC).
• Instructor Steven Frost was appointed faculty director of the B2 Center for Media Arts and Performance in the Roser Atlas Institute. In 2021, Frost opened solo exhibitions at the Storeroom and as part of the PlatteForum Residency, and participated in group exhibitions at the BMoCA, CVA, Friend of a Friend Gallery and Gallery 100. Frost’s work was recently acquired by the Denver Art Museum for its Education Collection. This fall, Frost will host an 8-week course in fashion and performance for local LGBTQIA+ teens.
• Professor Stewart Hoover, director of CMRC, published a new book, co-edited with Nabil Echchaibi, titled Media and Religion: The Global View. He also published several blog entries and a journal article focused on media and religion in contemporary politics.
• Associate Professor Polly E. McLean’s book, Remembering Lucile, is undergoing a second round of printing in paperback. McLean chairs the Chancellor’s History Project and is vice chair of the systemwide Faculty Council. She is the recipient of the Marinus Smith Award and was a panelist on the Hutchinson Black & Cook LLC webinar, “The Roots of Today’s Radical Exclusion in Boulder County & The Road Ahead.” Her class project documenting the history of Boulder’s Black women is now archived in the Library of Congress and American Folklife Center.
• Assistant Professor Colette Perold published her article “IBM’s World Citizens” in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing and presented a study on IBM’s role in crafting the first South American free trade agreement at the Charles Babbage Institute’s Just Code symposium, which will be published in a forthcoming book. She also received CMCI’s de Castro award along with Associate Professor Harsha Gangadharbatla.
• Assistant Professor Samira Rajabi’s book, All My Friends Live in My Computer: Trauma, Tactical Media and Meaning, was released in May 2021 from Rutgers University Press. She was also promoted to assistant professor of media studies for fall 2021.
• Assistant Professor Sandra Ristovska received a 2020–21 Research and Innovation Office Seed Grant from CU Boulder and a 2021–22 Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship for a research residency with the Scientific Evidence Committee of the Science and Technology Law Section of the American Bar Association. Her latest book, Seeing Human Rights: Video Activism as a Proxy Profession, was published by MIT Press in 2021.
• Assistant Professor Nathan Schneider continues to develop the Media Enterprise Design Lab, supporting more democratic startup ownership through projects like Exit to Community and more accountable online governance. His work has recently appeared in New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies and the Georgetown Technology Law Review, as well as Wired magazine and the Internet Archive’s blog.
• Assistant Professor Joshua Shepperd joined the department in fall 2020 as a media historian researching the parallels between critical media theory and critical intervention in media practice. As a fellow of the Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Board, he has worked on numerous grants, digital humanities and sound preservation initiatives, including organizing and directing the Library of Congress Radio Preservation Task Force.
• Associate Professor Rick Stevens completed another successful year as department chair, published five book chapters and presented four papers in 2020–21. His May 2021 chapter, “Adapting the Clan to the Klan: Modern Confrontations of White Nationalism in Young Adult Superman Comics,” appeared in John Darowski’s Adapting Superman: Essays on the Transmedia Man of Steel.
• Associate Professor Ted Striphas’ research and teaching focus on the history of media and technology. He is writing a book titled Algorithmic Culture about the origins of computational decision-making with respect to movies, music and more. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Cultural Studies.
• Scholar-in-Residence Hunter Vaughan is co-PI on the Sustainability and the Subsea Cable Network grant, awarded by the Internet Society Foundation to work on environmental sustainability and social equity in growing global digital infrastructures. Vaughan is also co-director of the U.K.-funded Global Green Media Network, building localized green film and media practices.

Communication & Society Residential Academic Program (CommRAP)

• Senior Instructor Sara Jamieson oversaw the launch of Connections: CMCI Summer Academy. As founding faculty director of the academy for the past two years, she enjoyed working with CMCI Inclusive Excellence Coordinator Dave Martinez, and CMCI’s Peer Mentor team to deliver an unforgettable experience for eight high school students. Last summer, she and her family returned to her field site on the Guajira Peninsula in Colombia, where she conducts anthropological fieldwork among indigenous Wayuu communities.
• Instructor John William Roberts will join CMCI’s CommRAP program to teach the courses MDST 2002 Media and Communication History and MDST 2032 Visual Literacies and Design.

Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance PhD Program

• Professor Mark Amerika is director of the TECHNE Lab and was the keynote performer at two international conferences, the Artificial Creativity conference and the International Digital Media Art Association conference. A survey exhibition of Amerika’s video and net art, titled There is no rewind button for life, will take place in Portugal in March. His next book, My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence, will be published by Stanford University Press in 2022.
• Associate Professor Lori Emerson is the director of the Intermedia Arts, Writing and Performance Program. She is also director of the Media Archaeology Lab, co-author of THE LAB BOOK: Situated Practices in Media Studies (University of Minnesota Press 2021), and author of Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (University of Minnesota Press June 2014).