Brown University Theses and Dissertations

Brown University Library archives dissertations in accordance with the Brown Graduate School policy.

For dissertations published prior to 2008, please consult the following Dissertation LibGuide

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Items (1-30) out of 30 results

Automatic Ethnography: Otherness, Indexicality, and Humanitarian Visual Media

Description:
My dissertation examines contemporary humanitarian media empowerment initiatives, arguing that their interventionist rhetorical strategies further exoticize their marginalized beneficiaries by mobilizing their alterity as a ...
Copyright Date:
2012
Contributors:
Rangan, Pooja Girish (creator) Chow, Rey (Director) Doane, Mary Ann (Reader) Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
Ethnography Indexicality Advocacy Animal Studies Childhood Studies Cultural Studies Ethnology Indexicals (Semantics) Labor Humanitarianism Human rights Media studies Visual anthropology Biopolitics Critical theory Culture--Study and teaching
Full Record

Convergent Reverberations: The Newness of Media at the End of History

Description:
This dissertation examines the period 1988-1996 from the perspective of two concurrent yet contrasting occurrences: the arrival of a supposedly final historical stage pronounced by ...
Copyright Date:
2016
Contributors:
Lison, Andrew Evan (creator) Chun, Wendy (Director) Rosen, Philip (Reader) Bewes, Timothy (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
New Media Multimedia Film Studies Cultural Studies 1989 Digital media Culture--Study and teaching
Available to Brown-affiliated users only
Full Record

Dark Optics: Blackness, Public Exposure, and Celebrity Image in Television and New Media Culture

Description:
“Look, a Negro!” The famous deictic cited by Frantz Fanon indicates both the spectacular and banal appearance of racial blackness in our field of vision ...
Copyright Date:
2016
Contributors:
Monk-Payton, Brandeise L (creator) Joyrich, Lynne (Director) Guterl, Matthew (Reader) Bogues, Barrymore (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
media celebrity Race Television Fame Publicity
Available to Brown-affiliated users only
Full Record

Exhibiting Cinema: The Moving Image in Art After 1990

Description:
This dissertation confronts the changing contours of what we call "cinema" through an examination of uses of the moving image and references to film history ...
Copyright Date:
2010
Contributors:
Balsom, Erika (creator) Doane, Mary Ann (Director) Chun, Wendy (Reader) Rosen, Philip (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
film theory contemporary art gallery film Experimental films
Full Record

Feminist Impositions: Performing Parasites in Contemporary Digital and Performance Art

Description:
The dissertation makes the case that recent digital and performance art practices have compelled a reappraisal of Western feminism, which has become increasingly vulnerable to ...
Copyright Date:
2012
Contributors:
Fisher, Anna W (creator) Chun, Wendy (Director) Joyrich, Lynne (Reader) Schneider, Rebecca (Reader) Munoz, Jose (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
digital contemporary art Parasitism Feminism Performance
Full Record

Hollywood's Trade Organizations: How Competition and Collaboration Forged a Vertically-Integrated Oligopoly, 1915�1928

Description:
This dissertation examines how producer-distributor trade organizations contributed to the emergence of the American studio system during the 1910s and 1920s. Established to oppose censorship ...
Copyright Date:
2011
Contributors:
Afra, Kia (creator) Rosen, Philip (Director) Doane, Mary Ann (Reader) Joyrich, Lynne (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
U.S. Film Industry Trade Organizations NAMPI MPPDA Hollywood Studio System Oligopoly Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America Censorship Public relations Vertical integration
Full Record

Homeless Movies: The Redemptive Project of the New American Cinema

Description:
This dissertation examines the politics of intimacy in the New American Cinema (NAC), an independent film culture that emerged in the U.S. at the ...
Copyright Date:
2015
Contributors:
Guilford, Joshua M (creator) Doane, Mary Ann (Director) Rosen, Philip (Reader) Chun, Wendy (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
New American Cinema intimacy studies public and private sphere theory film studies late modernity post-WWII American culture Jonas Mekas Ron Rice Pull My Daisy On the Bowery Guns of the Trees The Flower Thief Hannah Arendt Deborah Nelson Homelessness
Full Record

Images between Images: Cinematic Inventions of the Everyday

Description:
This dissertation argues that the everyday is a phenomenon invented along with capitalist modernity and modern technologies of representation, and that cinema is one of ...
Copyright Date:
2011
Contributors:
Liu, Linda A (creator) Rosen, Philip (Director) Doane, Mary Ann (Reader) Joyrich, Lynne (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
everyday everyday life cinema film theory indexicality contingency kracauer local film actualities art cinema global art cinema Motion pictures Contingency (Philosophy) Feminist films Actualities (Motion pictures) History
Full Record

Indiscrete Media: Television/Digital Convergence and Economies of Online Lesbian Fan Communities

Description:
This project confronts the term "convergence," which crystallizes a matrix of current cultural phenomena, from corporate consolidation to technical integration to user participation, that are ...
Copyright Date:
2010
Contributors:
Russo, Julie L. (creator) Joyrich, Lynne (director) Chun, Wendy (reader) Rosen, Philip (reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
fandom fan fiction new media media Marxism online communities television studies The L Word Battlestar Galactica Law and Order queer networks fan studies media industry the closet Convergence Media studies Digital media Communism Internet Television Battlestar Galactica television programs Law & order (Television program) Queer theory Lesbians Labor Popular culture
Full Record

Interpreting Video Games through the Lens of Modernity

Description:
This dissertation interprets video games in terms of the theory and history of modernity, complicating the scholarly analysis of video games by examining continuities and ...
Copyright Date:
2011
Contributors:
Soderman, Anton B (creator) Chun, Wendy (Director) Doane, Mary Ann (Reader) Rosen, Philip (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
modernity modernism gender marxism politics interactivity flow Csikszentmihalyi rendering innovation representation media game studies postmodernity Brecht Video games Civilization, Modern Digital media Aesthetics Modernism (Art) Sex Communism Capitalism Political science Clouds Computer graphics Television Ideology Computer games
Full Record

Interview-Work: The Genealogy of a Cultural Form

Description:
This dissertation provides a critical and materialist account of the history of the media interview. Starting with Henry Mayhew’s use of the interview to ...
Copyright Date:
2012
Contributors:
Sarlin, Paige (creator) Rosen, Philip (Director) Joyrich, Lynne (Reader) Rooney, Ellen (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
Marxism Documentary Form Communism Feminism Labor Media studies Publicity Liberalism
Full Record

Kein Kino: Autonomous Film after Adorno

Description:
This thesis works to clarify what an Adornean conception of Autonomous Cinema might look like through incorporating other theorists such as Aldous Huxley and Fredric ...
Copyright Date:
2018
Contributors:
Taylor, Miles H (Creator) Rosen, Philip (advisor) Koch, Gertrud (reader) Brown University (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969 Film Aesthetics German Cinema
Full Record

Late Cinema: Avantgarde, Medium, Capital

Description:
We are often told that ours is a “late” age. Lateness—as in the “late work” or “late capitalism”—simultaneously suggests something that has survived ...
Copyright Date:
2014
Contributors:
Noble-Olson, Matthew David (creator) Doane, Mary Ann (Director) Rosen, Philip (Reader) Rooney, Ellen (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
Film Cinema Modernity Art Motion pictures Civilization, Modern
Full Record

Making Black Lives Matter: on the circulation of images of black death on social media

Description:
With the 'massification' of digital media technologies comes their entanglements not only with our lives but that moment which defines each life, death itself. To ...
Date Created:
2017
Contributors:
Bramble, Victor (author) Azoulay, Ariella (advisor) Bogues, Barrymore (reader) Brown University (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
Social media Digital media Violence Anti-Blackness
Full Record

Narcissism and the Scene of Reading: Towards a Global Politics of Local Aesthetics

Description:
My dissertation challenges both the assertion and dismissal of identity politics in the humanities through a queer-diasporic overhaul of the concept of "narcissism." Both the ...
Copyright Date:
2013
Contributors:
Maitra, Aniruddha (creator) Joyrich, Lynne (Director) Chow, Rey (Reader) Chun, Wendy (Reader) Doane, Mary Ann (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
Literary Politics Otherness Narcissism Identification Ethnicity Globalization Reading Aesthetics Other (Philosophy)
Full Record

The politics of ambiguity

Description:
A project originating from a large-scale research paper in 2014, The Politics of Ambiguity explores the ambiguous networks of Turkish society and social movements in ...
Date Created:
2017
Contributors:
Gallo, Phoebe A. (author) Joyrich, Lynne (advisor) Chun, Wendy (reader) Brown University (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
Digital networks Social movements Turkey
Full Record

Racial Technics: Media and Machines in the Long Civil Rights Era

Description:
Racial Technics is a cultural, historical, and theoretical study that traces how competing conceptions of humanity and human freedom have been articulated at the nexus ...
Copyright Date:
2017
Contributors:
Litwack, Michael Ian (creator) Rooney, Ellen (Advisor) Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong (Reader) Joyrich, Lynne (Reader) Brown University. Department of Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
race American modernity Humanism Cybernetics media theory black freedom struggle Television Wynter, Sylvia philosophy of technology Communication and culture
Available to Brown-affiliated users only
Full Record

Reading machines: ambient writing and the poetics of atmospheric media

Description:
This thesis addresses the poetics and politics of "ambience" and "atmospherics" in contemporary culture. I am interested in how "ambient practices" often associated with the ...
Date Created:
2017
Contributors:
Mapes-Frances, Alec (author) Bewes, Timothy (advisor) Semerene, Diego (reader) Brown University (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
Ambient music (Electronica) Digital media Poetics Aesthetics
Full Record

Roma De Profundis: Post-Economic Miracle Rome and the Films of Dario Argento (1970-1982)

Description:
This dissertation examines three films by the Italian horror-thriller director Dario Argento set in Rome during the period of social and historical transformation following 1968 ...
Copyright Date:
2010
Contributors:
Siegel, Michael Loren (creator) Doane, Mary Ann (Director) Rosen, Philip (Reader) Riva, Massimo (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
Dario Argento Urbanity and Cinema Modern Roman History Italian Cinema Architecture and the Moving Image Horror Cinema Sessantotto 1968 Urban geography
Full Record

Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes

Description:
Laughter has a material history. In my dissertation, "Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes," I argue that comedy has haunted the emergence of cinema ...
Copyright Date:
2014
Contributors:
Hennefeld, Margaret D (creator) Rosen, Philip (Director) Rooney, Ellen (Reader) Doane, Mary Ann (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
Film Gender and Sexuality Modernity Theory Politics Media Civilization, Modern Political science Feminism
Full Record

The Anticolonial Snapshot: South Asian Disruptions

Description:
Anticolonialism is trapped in an impossible logic. The opposition to colonialism becomes the means of its persistence. Independence from British rule through the Partition of ...
Copyright Date:
2016
Contributors:
Mehta, Rijuta (creator) Rooney, Ellen (Director) Azoulay, Ariella (Reader) Honig, Bonnie (Reader) Gandhi, Leela (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
colonialism politics World politics Photography Literature Reading Archives Political science
Available to Brown-affiliated users only
Full Record

The Anticolonial Snapshot: South Asian Disruptions

Description:
Anticolonialism is trapped in an impossible logic. The opposition to colonialism becomes the means of its persistence. Independence from British rule through the Partition of ...
Copyright Date:
2016
Contributors:
Mehta, Rijuta (creator) Rooney, Ellen (Director) Azoulay, Ariella (Reader) Honig, Bonnie (Reader) Gandhi, Leela (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
colonialism politics World politics Photography Literature Reading Archives Political science
Available to Brown-affiliated users only
Full Record

The Anticolonial Snapshot: South Asian Disruptions

Description:
Anticolonialism is trapped in an impossible logic. The opposition to colonialism becomes the means of its persistence. Independence from British rule through the Partition of ...
Copyright Date:
2016
Contributors:
Mehta, Rijuta (creator) Rooney, Ellen (Director) Azoulay, Ariella (Reader) Honig, Bonnie (Reader) Gandhi, Leela (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
colonialism politics World politics Photography Literature Reading Archives Political science
Available to Brown-affiliated users only
Full Record

The Emergence of the Anime Media Mix: Character Communication and Serial Consumption

Description:
Representative of the phenomenon of media convergence felt across the globe, the state of contemporary Japanese animation (or anime) is characterized by the proliferation, interrelation ...
Copyright Date:
2008
Contributors:
Steinberg, Marc Aaron (creator) Doane, Mary Ann (director) Rosen, Philip (reader) Lamarre, Thomas (reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
Japanese anime consumer culture seriality Tetsuwan Atomu media mix media theory Character merchandising Convergence Communication Children Marketing
Full Record

The Human Figure on Film: Natural, Pictorial, Institutional, Fictional

Description:
This study provides a conceptual overview of the filmed human figure as a variable object of systematic inquiry. The word “figure” and not “body” is ...
Copyright Date:
2017
Contributors:
Watter, Seth Barry (creator) Rosen, Philip (Advisor) Rooney, Ellen (Reader) Koch, Gertrud (Reader) Brown University. Department of Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
History of Science Communication and culture Motion pictures
Available to Brown-affiliated users only
Full Record

The Projector Rests on a Pile of Books: Void and Medium in Postwar U.S. Culture

Description:
This dissertation addresses a conceptual form of negativity in the literature, film, and criticism of the United States during the period just following World War ...
Copyright Date:
2012
Contributors:
Tierney, Matthew A. (creator) Rooney, Ellen (Director) Chow, Rey (Reader) Daniel, Kim (Reader) Silverman, Michael (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
American culture film theory history of criticism Literary form Media studies Intermediality
Full Record

The Untimely Image: On Feminist Inactivism and Postcolonial Ethics

Description:
We are often told that we live in an age of protest, given the rise of political movements such as Black Lives Matter, the Women ...
Copyright Date:
2018
Contributors:
Padmanabhan, Lakshmi (creator) Gandhi, Leela (Advisor) Rooney, Ellen (Advisor) Azoulay, Ariella (Reader) Schneider, Rebecca (Reader) Brown University. Department of Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
Ethics Photography Postcolonialism Aesthetics South Asia temporality Critical Race Studies Feminist theory Experimental films Postcolonialism in motion pictures Women's rights Anti-imperialist movements Neoliberalism
Available to Brown-affiliated users only
Full Record

Undead: Bodies and Codes of Uncanny Vitality in the Media of Late Capitalism

Description:
This dissertation examines the shifts in reproduction, knowledge, and power that remap our notion of "life" in contemporary scientific and popular cultures through the uncanny ...
Copyright Date:
2011
Contributors:
Bering-Porter, David (creator) Rosen, Philip (Director) Doane, Mary Ann (Reader) Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong (Reader) Chow, Rey (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
Film Studies New Media Media studies Digital media Zombies Race
Full Record

Unlearning the Visual Regime (Through the Eyes of David Cronenberg)

Description:
This thesis, through a close reading of a selection of films by the director David Cronenberg (specifically: The Brood, Dead Ringers, Crash, A Dangerous Method ...
Copyright Date:
2018
Contributors:
Maier-Katkin, Hannah (Creator) Copjec, Joan (advisor) Rambuss, Richard (reader) Brown University (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
Psychoanalysis Cronenberg Horror
Full Record

Viscerally Uncomfortable TV: Affective Spectatorship and Televisual Neoliberalism

Description:
This dissertation explores the changing terms of neoliberal culture that are affectively registered in our most dominant media form, television. I examine the affective texture ...
Copyright Date:
2015
Contributors:
Hargraves, Hunter R (creator) Joyrich, Lynne (Director) Chun, Wendy (Reader) Schneider, Rebecca (Reader) Ouellette, Laurie (Reader) Brown University. Modern Culture and Media (sponsor)
Genre:
theses
Keywords:
American television affect Neoliberalism
Full Record

Items (1-30) out of 30 results