People

Assistant Professor

jamesncohen.com

Jamie Cohen is an educator, writer, speaker, and digital media producer focusing on civic media and internet literacies. Jamie holds a PhD in Cultural and Media Studies from Stony Brook University and specializes in memes and digital culture. He is also the Head of Education for Digital Void, an internet literacies collective that bridges the gap between digital life and everyday culture. Formerly, Jamie founded a higher education internet studies degree and led teams of students in immersive digital production design projects in Rome, Italy. Jamie teaches Advertising, Social Media, Digital Activism and Media Studies.

Julian Cornell is a Lecturer in Media Studies at Queens College – CUNY, where he teaches Film Genres, National Cinemas and Film Analysis. He is the Director of the Honors Internship Program in Media Studies and the Coordinator of the Film Studies Program. His primary research and teaching areas are American, Scandinavian and Japanese cinema and genre cinema, including disaster movies, science fiction, children’s films, animation and documentary. His work on children’s films, apocalyptic disaster movies and bad taste has been published in collections and journals and he has written for Vice.com and the film analysis Website ScreenPrism.com. His most recent project is an exploration of media narratives and social media responses to mass shootings and the mythology of gun violence in American society.

Prof. Cornell has taught Film at New York University in the Tisch School of the Arts, and Media at the Gallatin School For Individualized Study. He has also taught Film Studies and Screenwriting at Wesleyan University as a Visiting Assistant Professor. Prior to teaching, he worked in Scheduling and Network Programming at HBO and Cinemax, and in independent film production.

He received his BA in Film Studies from Wesleyan University, an MA in Film and Television from the University of California, Los Angeles and his PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University.

Professor
mara.einstein@qc.cuny.edu

 Associate Professor
jv.fuqua@qc.cuny.edu

JV Fuqua grew up in Texas. Fuqua has a PhD in Cultural and Critical Studies from the University of Pittsburgh and is an Associate Professor of Media History and Theory in the Department of Media Studies at Queens College. Fuqua is also the director of the Women and Gender Studies Program at Queens College. Fuqua is a former Fulbright Scholar (City University of Hong Kong, 2005). Their articles have been published in journals such as Cultural Studies and The Journal of Television and New Media, and the European Journal of American Culture. Other writings have appeared in anthologies and in digital sources such as In Media Res. Their first monograph, Prescription TV: Therapeutic Discourse in the Hospital and at Home was published in 2012 by Duke University Press. Their ongoing multi-modal research project engages with new materialist feminism and environmental cultural studies and documents the remains of extraction capital. A second current project is an auto-theoretical examination of nonbinary identity and the nonhuman world. Their research interests include environmental cultural studies, new materialist feminism, queer theory, and digital media theory. Their teaching areas include television and digital media theory, history, and analysis; documentary film and media; queer media; cultural and feminist media studies. Fuqua is an internationally recognized scholar who has served on the board of the international feminist media collective, “Console-ing Passions” and is currently a member of the editorial board of WSQ.

 Professor and Chair
amy.herzog@qc.cuny.edu
https://amyherzog.org

Amy Herzog is a media historian whose research spans a broad range of interdisciplinary subjects, including film, philosophy, popular music, gender and sexuality, urban history, pornography, gentrification, parasites, amusement parks, and dioramas. She is a Professor of Media Studies at Queens College and Coordinator of the Film Studies Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has also taught as Visiting Associate Professor at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.

Herzog is the author of Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and co-editor, with Carol Vernallis and John Richardson, of The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (Oxford, 2013). Her writing has appeared in several collections and journals, and she has presented her work at numerous venues including the Guggenheim Museum of New York, the New Museum, Dixon Place, New York Academy of Medicine, and The Morbid Anatomy Museum. Her most recent research project explores the history of peep show arcades in Times Square, New York.​

 Assistant Professor
sara.hinojos@qc.cuny.edu

Sara Veronica Hinojos has a PhD (2016) in Chicana and Chicano Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work focuses on popular film and television representation of Chicanxs and Latinxs and cultural studies with an emphasis on gender, race, language politics, digital media, humor studies, and sound studies. She is currently working on a book, The Racial Politics of Chicana and Chicano Linguistic Scripts in Media (1925-2014).

Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich is a filmmaker and artist who has completed projects in Kingston, Jamaica, Miami, Florida and extensively in the five boroughs of New York City. Her work has screened all over the world including at the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York and in Film Festivals such as New Orleans Film Festival, Doclisboa and Blackstar Film Festival. She was named on Filmmaker Magazine’s 2020 “25 New Faces of Independent Cinema List” and is the recipient of a 2022 Creative Capitol Award, a 2020 San Francisco Film Society Rainin Grant, a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Award, a 2019 UNDO fellowship and grant, and a 2014 Princess Grace Award in film.

madeleine.hunt.ehrlich@gmail.com

Assistant Professor

Leslie McCleave is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker who works across a variety of media. Most recently, she produced and directed the feature documentary, HOW SWEET THE SOUND – THE BLIND BOYS OF ALABAMA, the first film about this legendary gospel group. Her supernatural, environmental-awareness fiction feature, ROAD, won the Outstanding Performance Award at the Los Angeles Film Festival and was acquired by Showtime, iTunes and Snag Films. Her narrative shorts have won top awards at Sundance, SXSW, Locarno, and San Francisco International Film Festivals. She also created the 9/11 sound and video installation, CEDARLIBERTY (in 2010 with Elena del Rivero), which was presented at International Center of Photography and the New York State Museum. Her work has received support from Creative Capital, National Endowment for the Arts, IFP Radziwill Documentary Fund, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Irish Film Board and the Sundance Institute. She has an MFA in film production from New York University and is on the Media Studies faculty at Queens College, City University of New York, and has also taught at Emerson College and the New School.

 Professor
richard.maxwell@qc.cuny.edu

Richard Maxwell is a political economist of media. His research begins at the intersection of politics and economics to analyze the global media, their social and cultural impact, and the policies that regulate their reach and operations. He has published widely on a range of topics, from television in Spain’s democratic transition to Hollywood’s international dominance, from media politics in the post 9-11 era to how big political economic forces work in the mundane routines of daily life and culture.

His writing on media and cultural consumption draws attention to the specter of living life under ever expanding governmental and commercial surveillance. In 2012, Richard co-authored Greening the Media, with Toby Miller (New York: Oxford University Press) on the environmental impact of media and focuses on the environmental harms caused by media, information technologies, and electronics.

Maxwell received his BA in Communication and Visual Arts from the University of California at San Diego and his MA and PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin. He has previously taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University.

 Professor
PhD, Utrecht University, 2012
http://douglasrushkoff.com

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, which explores the always-on, simultaneous society in which we live, as well as how this new temporal landscape influences media, culture, economics, politics, and meaning.  He has written a dozen other books on media, technology, and culture, including Program or Be Programmed, Media Virus, Life Inc and the novel Ecstasy Club. He wrote the graphic novels Testament and A.D.D., and made the television documentaries Generation Like, Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and Digital Nation. He lectures about media, society, and economics around the world.

Rushkoff is a world-renowned expert on media and culture. Winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award for media writing, Rushkoff was named one of the world’s 10 most influential intellectuals by MIT. Originating such concepts as “viral media”, “social currency,” and “digital natives,” his research focuses on media, activism, social change, and human agency in a digital age. He is currently preparing a new book on the impact of digital technology on economics, and working on a graphic novel about a fictional occult war between Aleister Crowley and Adolf Hitler.

 Associate Professor

Noah is the author of the books Gods and Monsters: A Queer Film Classic (2009), Nollywood Stars: Media and Migration in West Africa and the Diaspora (2015), and Pink 2.0: Encoding Queer Cinema on the Internet (forthcoming), as well as essays in African Studies Quarterly, Black Camera, Cineaste, Porn Studies, The Velvet Light Trap, and numerous other journals and edited collections. His research focuses on theories, practices, and histories of African media (especially Nollywood), queer cinema, and documentary. Forthcoming forms of this research include articles and chapters on John Huston’s Army Signal Corps documentary Let There Be Light (1946), black queer subjects in American nontheatrical films of the 1960s, Nollywood genres, Africa’s intermedial economies, a book on documentary film as a therapeutic agent in 1940s America, and a book on documentary film and decolonization in West Africa.

Assistant Professor

shinjoung.yeo@qc.cuny.edu

Shinjoung Yeo (PhD. U of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Library and Information Science) is a political economist of information and communications. Her research is focused on the history of the Internet, global information and communication industry, geopolitics, labor, network infrastructures, and cultural and information provision. She has published several articles and book chapters including “Tech Companies and Public Health Care in the Ruins of COVID,” “Access Now, but for Whom and at What Cost?,” “Artists in Tech Cities,” “Science and Engineering in Digital Capitalism,” “From Paper Mill to Google Data Center,” and “Powered By Google: Widening Access and Tightening Corporate Control.” She has forthcoming books Behind the Search Box: Google and the Global Internet Industry from University of Illinois Press (April 2023), and Baidu: Geopolitical Dynamics of the Internet in China (Routledge, Winter 2022). She teaches the Political Economy of Media, Media and Capitalism and Media and Social Movement. 

Jill Carvajal – jill.carvajal@qc.cuny.edu

Michael Cohen, President Bizzy Signals Entertainment

Multiple Emmy award winning sports television executive, producer and media strategist.His career has ranged from successful start ups to major events, show creation and talent development.  His credits include some of the biggest events in television for all major networks including NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox and ESPN.

Michael was part of the production team for 9 Olympics Games, 4 FIFA World Cups, World Series, Super Bowl, Indy 500, Kentucky Derby, Wide World of Sports, NFL Drafts and the inaugural X Games.  He Produced the inaugural game for Major League Soccer on ESPN and was a founding executive of Soccer United Marketing. Michael is an executive media consultant with the United Soccer League.

Born and raised in Queens, NY and received his BA in Economics from Queens College.

Michael.Cohen2@qc.cuny.edu

Andrea DeFelice

Andrea DeFelice is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, and Digital Arts Faculty at Pratt Institute. She’s a visual artist with focus in new media art sculpture and video installation. For more information on her individual works, exhibitions and teaching, visit her website.

https://www.andreadefelice.com/
Contact: Andrea.Defelice@qc.cuny.edu

Andrea DeFelice

Thomas Grachowski

Thomas Grochowski (MFA Brooklyn College, PhD New York University) has taught at Queens College since 1996.  His research interests include: issues of gender and race in media (both theoretical and historical), documentary film, and new media.  He has published work on media and the O.J. Simpson case in the scholarly journals Television and New Media and International Journal of Cultural Studies. Recent publications include contributions to anthologies about the Marx Brothers, Sex and the City, and Routledge’s Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film.  His most recent piece, on Woody Allen, was published in the anthology Jews and Sex.  Courses he has taught at Queens College include: Media Criticism. History of Cinema, History of Broadcasting, Television Theory/Criticism, Film Theory, and Popular Music, Technology, and Society.  He has also taught at Brooklyn College, John Jay College, Hunter College, and Seton Hall University.  His is currently Assistant Professor of English at Saint Joseph’s College, Long Island, where he is developing the recently approved minor in film and media studies; every summer since 2001, he has taught his popular MEDST 381W course, Rock and Roll Films.

Juan Monroy

jmonroy@qc.cuny.edu
http://www.juanmonroy.com

Juan Monroy has taught courses on introductory film, film history, media theory, broadcasting history, and the economics of the television industry at Queens College, New York University, Fordham University Lincoln Center, the New School, and Marymount Manhattan College.

His research interests include television history, political economy of television, and media and globalization. His dissertation is a study of how the United States employed television to promote economic development as an anti-communist project in Latin America during the 1960s, following the Cuban Revolution. The recipient of research fellowships from the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Center of Media and Culture at NYU, and the University of Georgia’s Peabody Awards Lamdin Kay Visiting Research Fellowship.

Monroy earned his bachelors degree in Film Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his masters degree in Cinema Studies at NYU. He is currently working on his doctorate at NYU, also in Cinema Studies.

Richard Vetere

vetrich88@aol.com

Richard Vetere’s feature film screenwriting credits include The Third Miracle, produced by Francis Ford Coppola starring Ed Harris and Anne Heche. He wrote the screenplay adaptation of his own novel published by Simon & Schuster. He wrote the stage adaptation of his play The Marriage Fool and the movie stars Walter Mathau and Carol Burnett. He wrote the stage adapatation of his own play How to Go Out On a Date in Queens starring Jason Alexander and wrote the movie Vigilante. He has worked as Story Editor for network TV series on ABC and CBS, Disney and Touchstone and George Clooney and Warner Brothers. He has eleven published plays with Dramatic Publishing. Vetere is a Pulitzer nominated and Chicago Humanities guest as a playwright and is currently producing and writing a short film You & Me.

 Yin Mei Critchell, professor of dance in the Drama, Theatre and Dance Department and director of the dance program at Queens College, is a director/choreographer/performance artist known for category-defying works that fearlessly bridge geographic, technological, artistic, and cultural divides to create a unique brand of theatrical magic. Having forged a dance style employing Chinese energy direction and spatial principles as a means of creating contemporary dance theater, Yin Mei is uniquely positioned to explore themes of artistic and spiritual significance arising at the intersection of Asian traditional performance and Western contemporary dance.

 Currently navigating the ever-changing sports media landscape for a media conglomerate, Christos is adding to his BA in Media Studies from Queens College with graduate studies in areas of continued interest. These include political economy, narrative structure, and media management.

In a time where the cost of television broadcast rights are justification for a sports media behemoth laying off a significant minority of its workforce and athletes are taking a stand (or rather a kneel) against social injustices in our country, these areas of research are evermore pertinent.

 María Andrea Zita is working as an intern at Human Rights Watch as part of their multimedia team. Her work involves researching content for use in multimedia publications; video and photo editing; and drafting scripts for full-length and social media videos.

Human Rights Watch is an international human rights monitoring and advocacy organization known for its in-depth investigations, it’s incisive and timely reporting, its innovative and high-profile advocacy campaigns, and its success in changing the human rights-related policies and practices of governments and international institutions.

 Influenced by his background in international community development, digital literacy, and public education, Mike is interested in the cultural impact of digital technology in communities of limited contextual digital literacy. Alongside this, he aims to delve deeper into the roots of technological solutionism in education and business, the history of technology’s cultural symbolism, and the spirituality of technology. Ultimately Mike plans to help educators evolve digital literacy education into a holistic discipline that develops socially, culturally, and economically conscious technology users.

 Equipped with both a musical and a recording engineer background, Stephen is interested in the relationship between digital audio production workflows and their increasing orientation toward mass-market musical content. More broadly Stephen is fascinated with how art, technology, and social media expression have become imbued with the values of consumer culture and corporatism. One aspect of his research will focus on how thriving underground communities have eschewed these values and what lessons can be applied in the digital era.

 Keith studies how the for-profit education industry interacts with and alters public education policy – both inside the US and internationally. His work at Queens College focused on corporate education media’s impact on US learning. He currently writes and teaches in Santiago, Chile. Most recently he has covered the 2019 Chilean Protest Crisis. Read Keith’s work here: https://medium.com/@keithbevacqua/why-the-us-doesnt-care-about-chile-41f9526410e0

 Maribelle is interested in conceptualizing communication interventions and strategies to empower marginalized communities towards media democracy in the Philippines. She is also interested in the dynamic relationship between media and politics and in tackling issues of law and mass media. Maribelle’s research and writing focus on digital journalism and how it can be used as an advocacy platform for social development. Currently, Maribelle maintains a holistic self-development blog titled www.maribelleo.com that focuses on amplifying the journey of education for the Philippine youth.

 Josh studies how digital media literacy is hindered by corporations motivated by neoliberal policy and anti-democratic processes. He wants to work to establish  new tools to enhance individual liberties and revive communities, enhance dialogue, and promote sustainability. At the heart of the issue is civic engagement, which is an additionally important facet of his research. Josh recently published his article, “Reddit is Bringing Back the Lo-Fi Glories of Public Access TV” in the online journal, Medium.

 Dolores’s passions are issues of social justice and how to actively facilitate positive change. Her deep concerns are environmental issues, specifically the “ethics” of the U.S. food industry. Dolores is probably hungry…right now.

 Ali is a former associate producer and desk editor for NBC News in London and New York, and was a live host for PLAYMAX TV. These days, he balance his time between work, study and friends and wants to bring rigor to his journalism through media studies.

 Juan’s study of media analyzes the performative methods contemporary Chicana/o/x communities use in social media to engage nostalgia and re-frame identities/histories utilizing a decolonial lens. His work focuses on the performance of ethnicity, gender, cultural citizenship and sexuality in the continued search for the utopian. Juan is a recent graduate of UCLA holding a BA in Chicana/o Studies & LGBTQ Studies, his previous work as a scholar/activist has focused on Gay Chicano fiction & storytelling, Muralism, Performance, and archiving Queer Chicana/o/x cultural productions.

 Brian Hughes studies the media of extremity, with a focus on areas of political radicalism and esoteric religious experience. He is interested in the instrumentality of media in constructing belief, and works to apply media theory to matter and mind at their most fundamental levels.

Jonathan is a multidimensional artist, entertainer, and writer whose work centers on the way recorded music can shift people’s experience of reality and inspire the human imagination. Jonathan focuses on how interfacing with antiquated multi-dimensional media, particularly sound technology, can disrupt and drastically alter how individuals experience the contemporary world and their place in it. Jonathan is presently developing a large-scale music-based media project entitled “Nostalgia Therapy,” which simultaneously investigates the transportive effects of music, perceptions of time travel, and the phenomena of nostalgia for an era one has never actually lived through. www.jonathanejacobs.com.

 Growing up Roberto noticed a great change in his entertainment as he went from watching all inclusive shows like Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow to the largely homogeneous world of film and television and its often stereotypical portrayal of Hispanics. Roberto is interested in researching the reasons for this lack of diversity, on screen and behind the camera, and the effect it has on its overwhelmingly diverse audience both domestically and abroad. His research will also focus on what is being done by the industry to offer a more diverse and accurate portrayal of society, its audience, and what more can be done to further that progress.

 Arjeta’s focus is to learn the techniques and the ways that media is used to influence our public opinion and how we frame what is happening in the world. Her specific goal is to understand how media influences us, especially when it comes to migration. Arjeta not only questions how migrants are portrayed by mass media and its lasting effects on society but also how social networks, the digital world and media in general can transmit fair information about migration flows.

 Having gamed all his life, video games are as important to Phil as water is to fish. Phil is interested in exploring the complex and unique ways video games tackle narrative as well as the capitalism behind which video games get made and most importantly, which do not. He is also a proponent of digital media literacy for all people. Although technology is becoming increasingly relevant in today’s world, most people still do not comprehend the complex relationships they have with it. This is especially true for video games and how they are such a particularly rewarding entertainment experience. Phil’s one true goal is to change the way we understand video games.

 Adam is a musician, a writer and a filmmaker who is interested in philosophy, media theory and the politics of new media. He wants to explore the connections between people and technology as it relates to politics, culture, mind and community. Adam would like to experiment using different forms of media (text, audio/video, interactive media, etc.) to further his understanding between these unique relationships.

 lkponmwonsa’s acute knowledge in computer science has led to her current interests of the major transformation in media and the social world with the emergence of modern technologies. More broadly, she is interested in how the technological, the social media, the entertainment and the advertising industries are gradually reforming our society and culture. Ikponmwonsa’s research will focus on how media has affected individuals and society and what measures to apply in other to maintain a balance between the continuous growth of technology and our culture.​​

 Raphael seeks to explore the disruptive potential of alternative currencies and their impact on local economies. His dissertation applies a media ecological lens to money, presenting complimentary currency solutions as mechanisms for encouraging new forms of exchange—new environments which promote ecological sustainability, community building, and local economic resilience. Alternative and complimentary currencies seek to re-embed money into the social relations of community and trust, challenging the dominance of neoliberal capitalist discourse and utilitarian market values.