CEMI

Sophia Abbey is a master’s student in the Radio-Television-Film department at the University of Texas at Austin and holds a B.A. in Cinematography from Emerson College. Her research interests include cultural studies, embodiment, and the intersections of media and design. Her current work explores how television programs shot in Los Angeles represent and preserve the city.

Hannah graduated from UT Austin's RTF department with a Master's in Media Studies in May 2023, where she wrote her thesis on the recent shift towards Diversity-Equity-Inclusion models among funders of regional American film nonprofits. Prior to moving to Texas, Hannah spent four years with Denver Film as the Manager of Grants and Fiscal Sponsorship, where she worked on projects like the Denver Film Festival, Film on the Rocks, and filmmaker support programs. Hannah graduated with her Bachelor's from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2017 with degrees in Film and English with a focus on Creative Writing, as well as a minor in Business. In her undergraduate thesis, Hannah researched the impact of the evolving distribution model of streaming services on the representation of historically underrepresented demographics in front of and behind the camera in streaming original media. In her free time, Hannah enjoys Dungeons & Dragons, reading Agatha Christie, and being the slowest runner at every race.

Erin Reilly is a creator, educator and strategist with 20 years of experience inventing new approaches, products, services, and experiences about storytelling, engagement, and learning through immersive technology. Erin is Past Board President of NAMLE (National Association for Media Literacy Education), and is ex-officio of the Executive Committee of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Interactive Media Peer Group, as well as serves on advisory boards, such as SXSW Pitch Competition, Disney Junior Education and PBS children's programming, Hero Elementary and Emmy-award winning Sci Girls.

As an educator, Erin currently is Professor of Practice and Founding Director of Texas Immersive Institute, the interactive and immersive media hub at the University of Texas at Austin focused on research, projects, and learning the future of interactive and immersive media. In her role, she guides faculty and students in imagining where innovation meets entrepreneurship and builds university-wide initiatives, fostering relationships with other academic institutions and industry partners. Her most recent extension is working with UT Austin's OnRamps to develop a Short-form Video course. She has authored both academic and industry publications including Immersive in a University Setting white paper for the University of Texas at Austin, Headspace VR on Medium, Fan Favorites in Strategy + Business, T is for Transmedia: Learning through Transmedia Play, and co-author of the book, Reading in a Participatory Culture.

As a creator, Erin creatively builds connected, immersive experiences.  Current projects in development include Eyes on the Sky, a transmedia storyworld.

Her personal creative projects include CARPE´ Games, a new Augmented Reality and SMART Kit game and Winklebeans, a sensor-based toy that connects to a data-driven story world.  She is known for her social entrepreneurship activities in founding  Zoey’s Room, one of the first social media programs connected to a licensed afterschool program for young girls. 

As a strategist, Erin consults with private and public companies in the areas of audience engagement, creative strategy, and transmedia storytelling. She has been a frequent guest lecturer worldwide at universities as well as industry conferences such as SXSW, Sandbox Summit, and Nintendo Marketing Summit. Currently, she’s a strategic consultant to Infinity Festival.

Erin was a founding member of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab holding the positions of Managing Creative Director and Research Fellow from 2010-2018. Before that, she was Research Director for Project New Media Literacies at MIT and also has conducted classes as a Visiting Lecturer at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies and Harvard University’s Project Zero Summer Institute.  She is a graduate of Emerson College and has her Master of Fine Arts degree from Maine Media Workshops + College.  

Kate Cronin is a Program Manager with Code Nation (Chicago) where she works with young coders to develop the skills and professional networks necessary to pursue a career in tech. Kate’s academic research focuses on the labor of information professionals within the media industries, and her work has been published in Information & Culture and The Moving Image. She is currently co-authoring a book for Routledge based on the Media Industry Conversations series, entitled "Work in Progress: Navigating Work in the Contemporary Media Industries," and is also developing her dissertation “News, in Pictures if Possible!”: The Material Flow of Early Television Newsfilm” for publication as a series of articles.

Dr. Straubhaar is the Amon G. Carter Centennial Professor of Communications in the School of Journalism at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the current Director of the Moody College of Communications’ Latino and Latin American Studies Program and was the Director of the Center for Brazilian Studies within the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies, 2003-2006.

His primary teaching, research and writing interests are in global media, digital media and the digital divide in the U. S. and other countries, Brazilian and Latin American television, media and migration, and global television production and flow. His graduate teaching includes media theory, global media, media and migration, Latin American media, and ethnographic/qualitative research methods. His undergraduate teaching covers the same range plus introduction to media studies. He does research in Brazil, other Latin America countries, Europe, Asia and Africa, and has taken student groups to Latin America and Asia. He has done seminars abroad on media research, television programming strategies, and telecommunications privatization. He is on the editorial board for Communication Theory, International Journal of Communication, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, Comunicación y Sociedad, Chinese Journal of Communication, and Revista INTERCOM.

His edited book, Passarelli, B., Straubhaar, J., & A. Cuevas-Cerveró. (Eds.). (2015). Handbook of Research on Comparative Approaches to the Digital Age Revolution in Europe and the Americas. Hershey PA, USA: Information Science Reference-IGI Global. His book, Television In Latin America, co-authored with John Sinclair, was published by BFI/Routledge in 2013. His edited book, The Persistence of Inequity in the Technopolis: Race, Class and the Digital Divide in Austin, Texas, was published in 2011 by University of Texas Press. His book, World Television from Global to Local, was published by Sage in 2007. A revised 9th edition of his textbook with Bob LaRose, Media Now, was published by Wadsworth. He had an edited book with Othon Jambeiro, Políticas de informação e comunicação, jornalismo e inclusão digital: O Local e o Global em Austin e Salvador (Information and communication policy, journalism and digital inclusion: The local and global in Austin and Salvador); Federal University of Bahia Press: 2005.

He has published numerous articles and essays on global media, digital inclusion, Brazilian television, Latin American media, comparative analyses of new television technologies, media flow and culture, and other topics appearing in a number of journals, edited books, and elsewhere.

Dr. Scott is an associate professor in the Department of Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching interests include fan studies, media convergence, digital and participatory culture, social media, transmedia storytelling, comic book culture, and gender studies. She comes to Austin after previously teaching Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at Arizona State University, and serving as a Mellon Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center of Digital Learning + Research at Occidental College. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, and the University of Southern California. 

Dr. Scott’s scholarly monograph, Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry (NYU Press, 2019), considers the gendered tensions underpinning the media industry’s embrace of fans as demographic tastemakers, professionals, and promotional partners within convergence culture. Surveying the politics of participation within digitally mediated fan cultures, this project addresses the "mainstreaming" of fan and geek culture over the past decade, how media industries have privileged an androcentric conception of the fan, and the marginalizing effect this has had on female fans. 

She is also the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (2018), an anthology that brings together an international and interdisciplinary collection of nearly 60 established scholars to reflect on the state of the field and to point to new directions in fan studies research.

Her scholarly work has appeared in the journals Transformative Works and Cultures, Cinema Journal, New Media & Society, Participations, Feminist Media Histories, and Critical Studies in Media Communication as well as numerous anthologies, including Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (2nd Edition), How to Watch Television, The Participatory Culture Handbook, and Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica. In 2012, she was selected to represent the current generation of fan scholars to interview Henry Jenkins for the 20th Anniversary edition of Textual Poachers. She has guest blogged for the Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier and in media res, among others.

Jennifer McClearen is a feminist media scholar whose work examines the cultural production of difference in contemporary society with an emphasis on the mediation of gender, race, and sexuality in sports media. In the classroom, she blends theory and practice to train students to critically analyze and produce media culture.

Dr. McClearen’s first book, Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC, will be published with the Studies in Sports Media Series with the University of Illinois Press in April 2021. Her research can also be found in Communication and Sport, the International Journal of Communication, Continuum, New Formations, Feminist Media Studies, and The Velvet Light Trap, among others.

She is an affiliated faculty member in the Center for Sports Communication and Media at UT and a diversity scholar with the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan.

Dr. McClearen teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on gender, race, and sexuality in film and television as well as courses focused specifically on sports media.

Dr. Mallapragada is associate professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film, the College of Communication, at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also a faculty affiliate of UT's Center for Asian American Studies (CAAS), South Asia Institute (SAI) and the Department of Asian Studies.

Dr. Mallapragada's research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of new media studies, Asian American studies and transnational cultural studies. In particular, she is interested in the online articulations of racialized, brown, and transnational cultural identities within a South Asian American context. She recently published the book Virtual Homelands: Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United States which examines the role and politics of the Web in recasting notions of Indian-American identity and cultural citizenship since the late 1990s. Her work has been published in the journals New Media and Society, South Asian Popular Culture, Popular Communication and edited anthologies Web.studies: Rewiring New Media for the Digital Age (2000), Critical Cyberculture Studies: Current Terrains, Future Directions (2006) and Re-Orienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media Beyond Borders (2010).

Dr. Kumar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Asian Studies, the Center for Asian-American Studies and the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas-Austin.

Before joining UT in 2006, Prof. Kumar taught at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and the University of North Texas in Denton. He received his B.Sc. degree in Math, Physics and Chemistry from Osmania University, Hyderabad in India in 1987. He received a B.A. in Communication and Journalism in 1988, and an M.A. in Communication and Journalism in 1989, also from Osmania University. He received an M.A. in Media Studies from Texas Christian University in 1994, and Ph.D. in Telecommunications from Indiana University-Bloomington in 1998.

Prof. Kumar is the author of Gandhi Meets Primetime: Globalization and Nationalism in Indian Television (University of Illinois Press, 2006), and co-editor of Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU Press, 2003), Television at Large in South Asia (Routledge, 2012) and Global Communication: New Agendas in Communication (Routledge, 2013). He has published book chapters in several edited anthologies and articles in journals such as BioScope, Jump Cut, Popular Communication, South Asian Journal, South Asian Popular Culture, Television and New Media and Quarterly Review of Film and Video. 

Prof. Kumar has professional experience in journalism, advertising and multimedia industries in India. He worked as a sub-editor and a reporter for Deccan Chronicle which is the largest-selling English-language newspaper in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. He also worked as a multimedia designer and scriptwriter in the Education and Training Division at CMC Limited; one of the leading information technology firms in India.

Dr. Fuller-Seeley’s research specialization focuses on American film, radio and television history and audience reception studies. Before joining UT in 2013, Fuller-Seeley taught at Georgia State University in Atlanta and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. She received a BA in History from Agnes Scott College in 1982 and an MA and PhD in American History from the Johns Hopkins University in 1993.

Fuller-Seeley’s latest book, Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy, published by University of California Press in 2017, is an examination of the career of entertainer Jack Benny in the context of rapidly changing media industry and cultural norms in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s. She received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers in 2013 to support the project.

She is also the author of At the Picture Show: Small Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Smithsonian 1996/University Press of Virginia 2001), an examination of how film exhibition and moviegoing culture spread across the U.S. in the early silent film era. She is co-author (with Garth Jowett and Ian Jarvie) of Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy (Cambridge, 1996), a study of the first large-scale academic study of media influence on children in the 1930s. She edited Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing (University of California 2008). She has written Celebrate Richmond Theater (Dietz Press, 2001), a history of 200 years of stage presentation and film exhibition in Virginia’s capital city. One Thousand Nights at the Movies: An Illustrated History of Motion Pictures 1895-1915 (co-authored with Q. David Bowers) (Whitman, 2013), is a richly-illustrated history of the origins of film production and exhibition in the U.S. 

Fuller-Seeley has published book chapters in numerous anthologies on topics such as film stars Shirley Temple, and Rin Tin Tin, Dish Night giveaways in Depression-era movie theaters, early TV audiences, film exhibition and moviegoing history. She is featured in the 2017 motion picture history documentary “Saving Brinton” (Northland Films). She has been a consultant on PBS documentaries on actress Mary Pickford, and comedian Bob Hope, and for other moviegoing history documentaries and museum exhibits. She is currently working on scholarly projects about silent film directors/actors Francis Ford and Grace Cunard, Jack Benny’s television program, and early traveling film exhibition in the Midwest and Northeast.