Graduate Student Research Interests

This page displays the research interests of a number of our graduate students. For a complete directory listing of graduate students and their email addresses, please see the graduate student listing.

 

Erin Arizzi
arizzi@email.unc.edu

B.A., Vilanova University (English, Communication)
M.A., University of North Carolina (Communication Studies)

Generally, Erin is committed to questions of gender, labor, and power. More specifically, she is interested in how pregnancy is represented, experienced, and articulated at a moment in which technologies of assisted reproduction are increasingly becoming normalized. Because she loves to read fiction and watch movies, these investigations tend to materialize as critical analyses of popular literature and film.

 

Janel Beckham
  janel.beckham@unc.edu

 

William R. Reynolds Fellow in Communication Studies: B.A., Virginia Tech (English); B.F.A., American Intercontinental University (Visual Communication); M.A., San Diego State University (Communication Studies).

 

Miss Beckham is broadly interested in critical, postmodern, postcolonial, and queer theoretical approaches to a range of objects of study, most notably performances of difference and outsider artistry.

Janel Beckham’s CV

 

 

  Young Eun Chae
youngeun@email.unc.edu

 

B.A. Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea (Philosophy)
M.A. University of Chicago (Film History and Theory), University of Arizona (Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and Documentary Production)

 

Young Eun's main interests are Cinematic Representations of History, Trauma and Film, East Asian National Cinema, Political Implications of Representing Race, Gender, Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Nationality, Media Literacy, among others.

 
 

Steve Collins
sfcollin@email.unc.edu

 

M.A., University of California, Devis (Rhetoric and Communication)
B.S., Kansas State University (Speech Education)

 

Steve is interested in issues regarding rhetoric and memory, particularly in popular culture and civic public life.  Previously, his research in rhetoric has involved such diverse subjects as urban space, community representation, ethnomusicology, and popular media.  Steve plays guitar and is obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though he has never written about it.

Steve Collins' CV

 

Dana DeSoto
desoto@email.unc.edu

M.A., Communication, Washington State University
B.A., Communication Studies, Arizona State University
 

Dana is interested in issues of cultural studies, political economy and critical organizational communication. He focuses the potential blurring of these theoretical axes towards cultural dimensions of credit and debt, articulations of class, labor and citizenship, and campaign contributions as expressions of free speech.

 

Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz
fixmer-oraiz@unc.edu

 

Royster Fellow in Communication Studies
B.A., Indiana University; M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

 

Natalie's research centers on contraceptive technologies, cultural (re)reproduction, rhetorical theory, and feminism. Her current work explores the discursive terrain in which reproductive politics unfolds, particularly surrounding technological innovation.

 

Carolyn Hardin
 crichter@email.unc.edu

B.A., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Mathematics)
M.A., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Communication Studies)

Carey is currently focused on the problematic of theorizing the intersection of economic and cultural processes.  Her Master's thesis addressed the way that credit cards functioned within the United States in the 1990s.

 

Alex Ingersoll
alex.ingersoll@unc.edu

 

B.A., University of Iowa (Media Studies and Cinema)
M.A., University of Colorado, Boulder (Mass Communication Research)

Alex is interested in using critical, postmodern, and media studies as a way to explore issues of spatiality and visualization.  Research topics include info-aesthetics, info-visualization, virtual analytics, and visualized forms of the public and self, especially when it comes to location-based services and its wider implementation in media technologies.

 

 

Marjorie Hazeltine
mhazelti@email.unc.edu
 

Marjorie Hazeltine is a performance studies scholar and performance artist.  Marjorie's work investigates the identity of refugee, the "refugee narrative," and the performativity of refugee narratives in asylum seeking.  Marjorie received her undergraduate degree in Education with a minor in Communication at Arizona State University.  There she created/participated in solo, group, and community-based performances exploring Phoenix as a transient place/historical space, cultural memory, public education, gender construction, and refugee identity.

 

Rolien Hoyng
hoyng@email.ucn.edu 

 

Rolien is interested in media theory, historiography of media and technology, aesthetics, and spatial theory.  Topics that she works on include networks and space/place, publicness and the blogosphere, the notion of interactivity, archiving and the visual content industry, and the remediation of media technologies and temporality. For her dissertation, she aims at focusing on technology as a cultural form in Turkey.

 

Srinath Jayaram
jayaram@email.unc.edu

 

Srinath is trying to figure out why most people (including him) are not horrified by a million peasants committing suicide in India in the span of less than a decade. He is mapping out the affective investments that produce this urban-rural frontier which has come to be definitive of attempts to articulate the contemporary conjuncture in India. Committed to a Cultural Studies approach to studying contemporary struggles within and exterior to "global capitalism" (at the cost of being capitalocentric), his interests span subaltern studies, postcolonial studies, Modernity/Coloniality, new agrarian studies, social movements, and (post-structuarlist) post-development studies.

 

Shannon Wong Lerner
swlerner@email.unc.edu

 

B.A., San Francisco State University (English: Creative Writing), M.S., Michigan Technological University (Rhetoric and Technical Communication)

 

Shannon’s scholarly interests focus primarily on spiritual performance as a form of agency. Her Master’s thesis, Martin Buber and Luce Irigaray: Liminality and Historical Spiritual Moments intersects performance studies, Jewish studies, and feminist theory. In this thesis, performance is defined as particular gestures, voice, and movements that start with characters in biblical allegory. Through a reading of Buber and Irigaray, she explores how these moments recur as personal relationships with God, as well as become the basis for an ethics of communication within human communities. Currently, she is teaching a class at a trauma clinic for women that applies yoga, breath, and narrative to reparative performance. 

 

  David Montgomerie
dmontgom@email.unc.edu 

 

David's research and teaching centers on rhetorical theory and political communication. In particular, he is interested in how "the public" addresses itself, and how "the public" is constructed and deployed. His dissertation will address these questions insofar as they implicate mass movements throughout American history. This has led him to study Dewey, Lippmann, Arendt, Habermas, and others.

 

Billie Murray
  bjmurray@email.unc.edu

 

Billie Murray is a rhetorical critic invested in engaged scholarship. Her most recent research focuses on the effects of protest and media coverage of protests on discourses of democratic citizenship. She is specifically interested in how the increased regulation and surveillance of public spaces of protest in the 21st century have transformed the rules, roles, and spaces of democracy by disciplining protest, particularly in its disruptive function.

 

  Julia Scatliff O'Grady
jsogrady@email.unc.edu

 

I study the concept of work/life balance and how it shapes individual identities and societal discourses. I am interested in how work/life balance, as a term, can extend beyond the narratives of women and motherhood to include everyone. I work with air traffic controllers at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta, GA and plan to expand to two other research sites.  

 

Emily Ravenscroft
ravens@email.unc.edu

 

Emily Ravenscroft is an ABD, third year Ph.D student. She received her M.A. in Communication Studies from UNC in 2006. She focuses on Northern Irish Republican rhetoric and culture. She has spent the past three summers living in the Dun nan Gall (Donegal) Gaeltacht in Northwest Ireland, learning to speak Irish as a Foreign Language Area Studies Summer Fellow. She is currently conducting research in Belfast, Derry and Armagh as an Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellow.

 

Wayne Erik Rysavy
wrysavy@email.unc.edu

B.A. and M.A. Boise State University, Boise, ID (Communication Studies)

Wayne's research interests include new media technologies, virtual organizations and ethnography. In particular, Wayne's research focuses on the problematics of identity, culture, and temporal and spatial intersections that constitute the organization at a distance. Recent projects include: a Master's thesis titled "Virtual There: Social Structure Over Time And Space" that explored organizational culture and social structure in the virtual world of Second Life; and a conference paper presented at the 2008 Western States Communication Association conference in Mesa, Arizona that explored the nuances of ethnography in virtual spaces.

 

Allison Schlobohm
allisonschlobohm@gmail.com

B.A. Truman State University (Communication Studies)

Allison is a Master's student with a focus in rhetoric and interests in cultural studies and media studies. Lately she has been thinking a lot about AIDS panics in the United States and the populations which come to represent danger.

 

Jesica Speed
speed@email.unc.edu
 

B.A. Butler University (Communication Studies & Spanish), M.A. Louisiana State University (Communication Studies)

Jesica is interested in how communities can become better places for everyone.  Consequently, her research dances among organizational practices, leadership development, community building, performances in everyday life, teaching, organization/community relationships, and the related ethical implications.  She currently works for an educational non-profit in Durham, N.C., and her dissertation research will be based on her work in educationa and the Durham community.  

 

A. Freya Thimsen
  thimsen@email.unc.edu 

 

Freya is interested in the question of the relationship between the  individual and the
collective as that relationship is mediated by  tropes of subjectivity and technology.
Much of her work focuses on  the body as a political symbol, epistemic medium, and avenue for  ethical action in visual culture. Her primary research topic is the  trope of the
body politic in modern political theory and contemporary  cultural theory.  Ancillary
research topics include anatomical museum  display, the rhetoric of cinematic violence,
the legal rhetoric of  the corporation, representations of technology and the body in 
cinema, celebrity politicians, and confessions.

A. Freya Thimsen’s CV 

 

 

Tessa Thraves
tes@unc.edu

 

Tes has been working largely on community food systems and diversity/equity in sustainable agriculture. Her dissertation work is on Identity and community stories and the daily practice of Hope.

Tessa Thraves’s CV 

 

 

Leah Totten
ltotten@email.unc.edu 

 

Houle Engaged Scholar, 2008-2009
M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (communication studies)
B.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (public relations and
political science)

Leah's research focuses on organizing for social change and the implications for community and individual well-being.  She has a particular interest in problems of self-identity and the relationship to the other, the processes and mechanisms of collective agency, the rhetoric of dominant institutions
and social change organizations, and the roles of dissent and conflict in community change.  Her dissertation explores the tensions and challenges facing UNC as it increases emphasis on public service and engaged scholarship.

Leah Totten’s CV

 

Armond R. Towns
atowns@email.unc.edu

 

Armond views the "world" through a critical, cultural, rhetorical, aestheticized, performative, mediated lens. His research focuses on the (re)production of "race" and "gender" of African American males, specifically within (new) media. Seeing a world still fraught with moderinity, and, supposedly, trying to escape, he asks, how exactly are raced and gendered bodies (black masculinity) "produced", as opposed to represented, by the media to unfold certain rhetorical messages about these bodies? Generally speaking, how is the (re)production of black masculinty (spacially, temporally, communicatively, behaviorally) hindered by modernity's framework of race and gender, which is then mediated as the correct "representation" of what black masculinity is allowed to be? The philosophies of Heidegger, Focault, Deleuze, Marx, West, Butler, DuBois, Hill Collins, and many more help inform this research.

Armond Town's CV

Stace Treat
streat@email.unc.edu
 

Broadly considered, my research focuses on the rhetorics and performances of everyday
life.  Key theoretical issues include identity, subjectivity, memory, and narrative as
articulated rhetorically and performatively in entertainment products and tourist
practices.  I am specifically interested in the intersections of sound technologies and
bodily mobility in the production of public places.  My dissertation research focuses on
audio walking tours of city neighborhoods and popular heritage/tourist sites.

 

Melody Van Lidth de Jeude
vanlidtm@email.unc.edu
 

Melody studies leadership as management of meaning at the intersection of (inter)national cultures, corporations, and new communication technologies, particularly in business schools. For her dissertation work, she has begun an ethnographic study of Asian students in a global MBA program. When not teaching or writing, she’s fascinated with the problematic truth claims raised by journalistic fabulists like Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair and the memory fabricators like Benjamin Wilkomerski or Herman Rosenblat. She also worries about the discourse of authority in plagiarism cases and grade inflation.

 

Grover Wehman
wehman@email.unc.edu

B.F.A. The Pratt Institute

Grover is interested in the performance and rhetoric of class in the United States. She is particularly focused on class assimilation and class passing within working-class and poor communities-- the ways passing effects community organizing and political rhetoric, and how passing and assimilation interact with other positionings and negotiations of race, citizenship status and queerness.

 

Sindhu Zagoren
zagoren@email.unc.edu

  B.A., Antioch College; M.A., University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

 

Sindhu Zagoren's primary research interests are in the relations among media, access, and social movements. She has been serving on the board of the People's Channel, Chapel Hill's local non-profit public access television station, since 2005.

 

 

 

If you are a graduate student and would like to add or change information, please contact Vilma Berg at vberg@email.unc.edu. If you are a visitor to this site and you have question about any of its content, please email vberg@email.unc.edu or contact the appropriate graduate student.