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FILM AND VISUAL STUDIES PhD HARVARD UNIVERSITY

FILM AND VISUAL STUDIES GRADUATE STUDENT PROFILES
 

Zach Furste
Zach Furste is a G1 in Film and Visual Studies. He comes to Harvard from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA where he earned a bachelors in English Literature and founded the Western Society of Theory and Criticism while taking in the lush splendor of the Pacific Northwest. Zach is fascinated by the theoretical, political, and ethical possibilities of the moving image and has interests in experimental film and media, modern and contemporary art, and the connections between aesthetics and politics.

Katie Kohn
Six years ago Katie Kohn was looking for contemporary philosophy at an American university in New York and found it in film and media studies. After graduating early from NYU with a BA in Cinema Studies and a minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies (that, due to a bureaucratic error of entirely the university's doing, never officially appears on her record), Katie decided to go pro. Despite having already set her sights on pseudo-mythical (yet entirely legitimate) intellectual boot-camp of the Alps, the European Graduate School, Katie nevertheless decided to be prudent about graduate school and spent her spare year in London, drinking legally and working towards a venerable MA in Contemporary Cinema Cultures through Kings College, U. of London before ascending the mountains to rub elbows with some of the "who's who" of continental philosophy, do a bit of hiking and watch the glaciers melt. She is currently G1 on the PhD track in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University where her work in visual theory keeps her running from law to philosophy to popular media and back again. Katie is also interested in the relation between sculpture and film and is currently vetting the topic for a research project.
In her spare time, Katie writes comics and young adult novels for chicks and is deeply protective of girl culture. She currently has no academic publications, nor does she have a house cat. She fully intends to change this in the near future.

Stephanie Lam
Stephanie is a G1 student in Film and Visual Studies. Her interests include film and media theory and history, with particular emphasis on modernity, issues of temporality and the moving image, the politics of attention and screen culture, film beyond the theatre, technology and the senses, and diasporic cinemas.  Stephanie has published in CinéAction and Offscreen.  She has a BA in English from the University of British Columbia, a BFA in Film and Art History from Concordia University and an MA in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto.

Jungmin Lee
Jungmin Lee is a graduate student and practitioner in the PhD program in Film and Visual Studies. She holds a dual bachelors degree with Honors in Modern Culture and Media and French Civilization from Brown University, where she completed her thesis titled “Modes of Exhibition as Mediated Space: Projection Installation as Spectatorial Frame.” Trained in film studies and critical theory, she probes alternative modes of exhibition within the converging site of art, architecture, and moving images, with particular attention to issues of “public” and “private,” and of the material and virtual. Further areas of interest include memory, urban space, the senses, and performance theory. Her international observations from South Korea, France, and the United States have motivated her to consider the transnational flow and interventions of new media and artistic tendencies. In 2010, she attended Université Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne and Paris VIII and has also worked for May, contemporary art publisher based in Paris. Most recently, she served as an editorial researcher for a publication by ToastinK Press in association with Sternberg Press and les presses du réel. In the US, she has served as a co-chair of Brown/ RISD Hillel Gallery. She is the recipient of the Brown University’s William Weston ’43 Award in Fine Arts and the Greenberg Prize in French Studies in 2011. She intends to pursue Critical Media Practice as a secondary field at Harvard, having received classical and conceptual training from Carnegie Mellon School of Art and Rhode Island School of Design.

Kyle Parry
Kyle Parry is a graduate student and media practitioner at Harvard. In 2009 he entered the PhD program in Film and Visual Studies, having studied Rhetoric and Development Studies at UC Berkeley. He has since joined the secondary field in Critical Media Practice, and, as of the summer of 2011, works as a researcher with the metaLAB (at) Harvard. He is interested in translating ideas and methods from across disciplines into critical but also accessible written, audiovisual, and web-based work. The emphases of his dissertation and CMP capstone projects are evolving, but he is exploring a synthesis of phenomenology, information science, STS, and visual and media studies.

Joana Pimenta
Joana Pimenta is a first-year graduate student in Film and Visual Studies, intending to pursue a secondary field in Critical Media Practice. Joana is currently interested in exploring issues of space and scale at the crossroads between cinematic and networked media practices (urban installation, mobile devices, place-based media, among others). Areas of interest include visual studies, critical media practice, film studies, architecture, history of science, and perception studies. She completed her BA at the New University of Lisbon (and at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis through an Erasmus fellowship), and has since then been developing research work as a junior researcher for the project Film&Philosphy: mapping an encounter at the Philosophy of Language Institute in Lisbon, and as guest researcher affiliated with the Imagined Futures of the Cinematic Dispositif research group at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam), as well as at the Visual and Environmental Studies department at Harvard University.

Kate Rennebohm
Kate is thrilled to be working towards her Doctorate in Harvard’s Film and Visual Studies program.  Kate completed her Masters degree in Cinema Studies at Concordia University in Montreal and her BA at University of Alberta. She has published articles in the film journals Offscreen and Synoptique, and has worked as a film reviewer. Kate has worked for the Telluride Film Festival for four years, and will return as long as they’ll have her! During her Doctorate, she wishes to expand upon the work performed during her Masters’ thesis, which focused on the filmmaking of Chantal Akerman and Judith Butler’s recent writing on ethics. While her specific interests are found in the study of post-structural ethics and film, Kate’s general interests include film and philosophy, gender studies, the slow cinema movement (although she’s not sure how she feels about that name) and representations of identity in film and television. And finally, she thinks that, although there have been many amazing contenders, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is still the best television show ever.