Current Fellows, 2017-19
Li Cornfeld
Email: lcornfeld@amherst.edu
Li Cornfeld is a feminist media scholar. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication Studies from McGill University in 2017. Her dissertation, funded by the American Association of University Women, examined live presentations of emerging technologies. She is currently researching spectacles of expertise and the formation of public knowledge, a project that focuses on TED Talks. Additional projects include a recuperation of media studies' roots in anti-fascism and a history of sex and technological innovation. She has held faculty appointments at Stony Brook University and at the Rugao Teacher's College in Nanjing, China. Forthcoming publications include articles in Feminist Media Studies and Women & Performance.
Colleen Kim Daniher
Email: cdaniher@amherst.edu
Colleen Kim Daniher holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. From 2015-17, she was a Presidential Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. Her teaching and research interests include critical race studies, visual cultural studies, and Asian diasporic theatre and performance. Her book manuscript, Obdurate Sights: Performing Racial Ambiguity in American Visual Culture, investigates how racial ambiguity came to be both an aesthetic strategy and a performative mode of racialized sight in 20th-century American performance and visual culture. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Society for Theatre Research, the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, and the American Theatre and Drama Society. Recent and forthcoming publications include writing in e-misférica, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, and Canadian Theatre Review.
Amy Johnson
Email: acjohnson@amherst.edu | Twitter: @shrapnelofme
A linguistic anthropologist, STS scholar, and erstwhile baklava eating contest champion, Amy Johnson studies how communication technologies change ideas of personhood and governance. Johnson is currently working on the book manuscript of Twitter and the Body Parodic: Global Acts of Re-creation and Recreation, which investigates the collaborative creation of Twitter parody accounts as a global form of social critique and verbal artistry. Johnson’s research mobilizes a mixture of methodologies, including ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, public records requests, and linguistic analysis across English, Japanese and Arabic. Johnson holds a Ph.D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society from MIT and was a research affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.
Jennifer Pranolo
Email: jpranolo@amherst.edu
Jennifer Pranolo’s research and teaching focus on the history and theory of film and photography, aesthetics, and new media. Her current book project traces an alternative genealogy of photographic space, offering new models for thinking through the stakes of contemporary photographic practice in light of the information age. She holds a B.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University, an M.A. in Film and Comparative Literature from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Film and Media from the University of California, Berkeley. She was a Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow with the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program.
Caterina Scaramelli (2016-18 Keiter Fellow)
Email: cscaramelli@amherst.edu
Caterina Scaramelli received her Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her current project, based on anthropological research and intersecting with Science and Technology Studies (STS), examines the culture and politics of environments. Her book manuscript “Swamps into Wetlands” tracks the emergence of the category of the wetland, and examines how a varied range of groups in Turkey are making and contesting sites of livable natures in rural areas.
Maria Sidorkina
Email: msidorkina@amherst.edu
Maria Sidorkina received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University in 2016. Her work examines illiberal publics and politics through a focus on language and social interaction. She is currently preparing a book manuscript, Counter-conduct and Collective Belonging in Contemporary Russia, on Putin-era activists’ use of innovative social forms—from “Monstration” parades to “Total Dictation” flashmobs, from discussion “flamewars” to “trolling” protests. Other interests include Soviet language theory and the emergence of new visions of citizenship across online and offline conversations.