Programs › Los Angeles, CA
Examines the history and culture of visual and digital media, from documentary and experimental history in film, TV, and games to data visualization and surveillance, as a scholar-practitioner.
Studies vocal communication, laughter, and music from an evolutionary perspective using acoustic analysis, perception and psychophysiology experiments, and cross-cultural field studies.
Studies the dynamics of conversation and interpersonal coordination, from eye movements to vocal rhythm and body language, via computational modeling, naturalistic behavior analysis, and experiments.
Examines how journalistic norms of newsworthiness shape coverage of party conflict and presidential communication, and how the resulting party messages affect US public opinion.
Studies how evolution shapes the social mind, testing whether women's fertility cycles shift mating psychology and produce detectable cues, using photographs, vocal recordings, and body odor samples rated by others.
Studies nonverbal visual communication and social categorization, pinpointing face and body cues with eye-tracking, 3D motion analysis, psychophysics, psychophysiology, and experiments.
Studies contemporary entertainment industry practices, Hollywood independents and media labor, and film and television history through production studies and feminist film theory.
Examines how race, gender, and globalization interweave through visual culture, fashion, film, and performance across Asian American, Chinese, and Caribbean contexts.
Studies Chicano/Latino arts and media through their aesthetic, social, and institutional histories, combining archival work, exhibition curation, and advocacy for media access.
Examines European and Eastern European cinema, nationalism, violence, and trauma, as well as digital technologies, surveillance, and affect, through critical film and media theory.
Studies negativity in news coverage, how media inform publics about policy, and media effects on policy attitudes using surveys, automated content analysis, and psychophysiological experiments.
Studies how social categories and stereotypes shape how people think about humans and non-humans, including basic shapes, voices, and robots.
Studies television history, queer and feminist media, and global and Third Cinema through critical theory and cultural criticism.
Studies how infant vocalizations and speech emerge in typical and atypical development and how human vocal signals evolved, using computational modeling and naturalistic audio recordings.
Studies human social perception and intention recognition through cognitive modeling and psychophysical experiments to build communicative, trustworthy AI and robots.
Examines how Italian cinema represents mixed-race Italian and African subjects and shifting ideas of race and nation, alongside Black European and digital feminist studies.
Studies how party organizations shape candidate strategies, representation, and electoral competition across democracies via formal theory, experiments, statistics, interviews, and coded party rules.
Uses mathematical and computational modeling to study how ideas, technologies, and behaviors spread through social networks and how the wisdom of crowds aggregates information.
Studies film in African-American communities, Classical Hollywood censorship, and media's role in struggles for racial justice through historical and critical analysis.
Studies film aesthetics, industries, circulation, and audiences, especially Southeast Asian cinema and Manila's alternative film culture, through cultural studies and theories of space.
Studies the psychological roots of climate inaction and human motivation using computational modeling, machine learning, and experimental psychology to inform climate policy.
Studies how recommendation algorithms shape exposure to content such as radical YouTube videos, using large-scale behavioral data, counterfactual bots, and causal inference.
Studies how communicative context shapes language use, combining natural language processing, psycholinguistics, and HCI to generate image descriptions for blind and low-vision users.
Studies media histories, Latinx studies, and Los Angeles movie palaces and screen landmarks through feminist historiography and media-based organizing.