Prof. Ahmet Atay holds the rank of Professor of Communication Studies at the College of Wooster, serving as Program Chair of Global Media & Digital Studies and liaison to the Digital Visual Storytelling Pathway. His academic journey includes degrees from Marmara University (B.A., 1998), Ohio University (M.A., 2001), University of Northern Iowa (M.A., 2003), and Southern Illinois University (Ph.D., 2009). His research focuses on transnational communication, digital media's societal impact, cultural identity formation in global contexts, and queer diasporic experiences. He actively explores media representation of gender/sexuality, critical pedagogy, and autoethnography as research methodologies. Notable projects include editing works on millennial media ecology, intercultural communication pedagogy, and transnational queer cinema. Teaching responsibilities include courses on intercultural communication, mediated gender studies, and digital storytelling for social justice. He has held leadership roles in professional organizations like the National Communication Association and Central States Communication Association. Prof. Atay's recent publications emphasize digital ethnography, decolonizing communication studies, and queer pedagogy innovations. His work bridges theoretical frameworks with practical educational applications, addressing contemporary issues like diversity in academia and media's role in shaping cultural narratives.
Matthew Potolsky is Professor of English at the University of Utah, specializing in nineteenth-century literature and literary theory. His career spans from 1998 Lecturer at Harvard University to current University Professorship. He earned a BA in Comparative Literature and Philosophy (1990), followed by MA and PhD in Comparative Literature (1992, 1997) from UC Irvine. Chair of English Department (2013-2016) University Professor (2014-2016) Research focuses on Decadence , Mimesis , Finance-Aesthetics intersections , and Government Secrecy . His work traces connections between financialization and decadent aesthetics, revealing how economic cycles influence artistic production. Key themes include: Decadent anti-realist literary movements Finance capital's cultural impact Decadent counterpublic formations Victorian aesthetic education debates Sublime aesthetics in national security Cosmopolitanism in literary communities Recent publications analyze: Decadent style as financialization rhetoric Reintroduction of verisimilitude theory Decadent responses to financial crises Mimetic labor in artistic production Decadent cosmopolitan counterpublics Historical parallels between financialization and literary decadence
Ceren Budak is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and holds a joint appointment as Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the College of Engineering. Her work bridges computer science, statistics, and social sciences through computational social science approaches. Her educational background includes a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2012) and a Bachelors degree in Computer Science from Bilkent University in Turkey (2007). Prior to joining the University of Michigan faculty, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research New York. Professor Budak's research centers on computational social science, with particular emphasis on analyzing large-scale datasets to address questions with social, political, and policy implications. Her work spans several interconnected domains: News Media Production & Consumption (examining bias in news outlets and reader preferences), Social Movements & Media (using social media data to study collective action), Social Networks (understanding information diffusion processes), and Measuring and Promoting the Quality of Online Discussions (developing tools to improve online conversations). She teaches SI 608 (Networks) and SI 618 (Data Manipulation and Analysis) at the School of Information. Her publication record demonstrates consistent contributions to understanding how online information ecosystems operate, with recent work focusing on AI-human collaboration, misinformation dynamics, social movement framing, and the application of computational methods to political communication. Her research shows a clear trajectory from foundational work on social network diffusion to increasingly sophisticated analyses of contemporary information challenges. Among her service activities, she has served as Registration chair for COSN (ACM Conference on Online Social Networks) 2015 and as Program Committee Member for numerous prestigious conferences including WWW, ICWSM, WebSci, AAAI, and others. She has also been involved in organizing the MSR NYC Data Science Seminar Series and instructing the Microsoft Research Data Science Summer School.
Genesea M. Carter serves as the Associate Director of Composition and Associate Professor in the English and University Composition Program at Colorado State University. She holds a PhD from the University of New Mexico. Her research focuses on administrative systems in higher education, including curriculum design, teacher training, and workload equity, and their impact on instructors’ well-being. She also investigates how students from diverse backgrounds navigate academia, with a focus on working-class pedagogy and identity development. Her recent co-edited collection Systems Shift: Creating and Navigating Change in Rhetoric and Composition Administration (2023) addresses institutional transformation. Earlier work includes Class in the Composition Classroom: Pedagogy and the Working Class (2017), exploring socioeconomic diversity in education. Her articles span topics like digital literacy, interdisciplinary pedagogy, and critical theory in composition studies. Dr. Carter’s scholarship emphasizes equity, intersectionality, and dismantling neoliberal structures in academia. She has contributed to journals such as Composition Studies , Journal of Teaching Writing , and Open Words , and her work bridges practical administration with theoretical frameworks in rhetoric and composition.
Charles Athanasopoulos is an Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies & English at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on intersections of Black rhetorics, media, and culture, with expertise in The Black Radical Tradition, Rhetorical Theory, and Cultural Critique. He earned his Ph.D. in Rhetoric & Communication from the University of Pittsburgh. His work analyzes racial progress, public symbols, and post/Ferguson America through lenses of iconoclasm and critical race theory. Education: Ph.D., Rhetoric & Communication, University of Pittsburgh. Research interests span Black American and Diasporic Cinema, Afro-Caribbean and Greek-Roma identity critiques. He has published in venues like Lateral: The Journal of the Cultural Studies Association and Western Journal of Communication. His 2024 book Black Iconoclasm explores dismantling racial symbols in public discourse. Recent articles address Fanonian thought, anti-racist campus rhetoric, and transnational Blackness studies. His publications critically engage with visual activism, film analysis, and decolonial theories. Current projects include studies on sonic rhetorics in Black women’s music and global race discourses in Mediterranean contexts.
Ruihong Huang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, part of the College of Engineering. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Utah (2014) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. Her research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP) with emphasis on information extraction, event recognition, media bias analysis, and ethical AI applications. She teaches courses like Information Storage and Retrieval (CSCE 470), Natural Language Processing (CSCE 638), and has advised numerous PhD, Master’s, and undergraduate students. Key research contributions include work on event coreference resolution, discourse analysis, and detecting media bias through event relation graphs. Huang has developed benchmark datasets like UAL-Bench and EMONA, and her work spans applications in disaster management, fake news detection, and moral reasoning in LLMs. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and serves on program committees for top conferences like ACL and EMNLP. Her academic service includes roles as Area Chair for ACL 2024 and Senior Area Chair for EMNLP 2024. She maintains an active lab group focusing on NLP fundamentals and real-world applications, with projects involving propaganda identification, polarity calibration for opinion summarization, and multimodal dialog act classification. Huang has published over 80 papers in top-tier venues such as NAACL, EMNLP, ACL, and NeurIPS.
Kären Wigen is the Frances and Charles Field Professor in History at Stanford University, specializing in Japanese history and the history of cartography. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley (1990). Her research spans: Historical geography of East Asia Early modern Japanese regional economies Geographies of the imagination Transnational maritime histories Critical cartography and spatial analysis Her publications include eight major works from 1992-2025 analyzing spatial transformations in Japan and global metageography, with recent projects focusing on temporal dimensions in cartographic representation. She co-edited Seascapes (2007) and Cartographic Japan (2016), and serves as Director of Stanford’s Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities since 2022.
University of California , Santa Barbara (UCSB)United States
Alenda Y. Chang serves as an Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. With a multidisciplinary background spanning biology, literature, and film, she integrates ecocritical theory with contemporary media analysis. Her scholarly work appears in journals including Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment , Qui Parle , and electronic book review , focusing on sustainable media practices and ecological frameworks for digital engagement. Her educational background includes: M.A. and Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley M.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Maryland Chang specializes in environmental media and game studies, developing theoretical frameworks for ecological game design. Her research examines how digital games model environmental systems and foster player engagement with climate change through concepts like "slow violence" and "rambunctious play." She advocates for sustainable design patterns that address gaming's carbon footprint while creating immersive ecological narratives. Analysis of her 15 most recent publications reveals a consistent trajectory from foundational ecological game theory (2013-2018) to current work on thermal contexts of play and sustainable infrastructure (2022-2024). Her scholarship increasingly bridges data-driven activism with critical game design, emphasizing multispecies entanglements and infrastructural play as tools for environmental awareness. As co-founder of Wireframe—a collaborative media studio at UCSB—Chang cultivates critical game design practices through initiatives like growinggames.net . The studio supports data-driven global media art, environmental activism, and experimental pedagogy, serving as a hub for translating ecological theory into tangible digital interventions that challenge anthropocentric perspectives in gaming.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State UniversityUnited States
Justin Russell Greene serves as an Advanced Instructor in the Department of English within Virginia Tech's College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. With over 15 years of teaching experience across multiple institutions, he currently teaches courses in film, literature, and writing at Virginia Tech, where he has been employed since 2019. His academic journey spans various teaching positions at Virginia Tech, Hampden-Sydney College, Virginia Commonwealth University, and several community colleges. Greene earned his BA, MA, and PhD in English and Media, Art, and Text from Virginia Commonwealth University. His educational background reflects his interdisciplinary approach that bridges traditional literary studies with contemporary media and cultural analysis. He has also completed professional development certifications in Anti-Racist Teaching and Foundations of Online Teaching at Virginia Tech. His research focuses on the intersections of cinema, media, and cultural studies, with particular attention to authorship, celebrity, and gender performance. Greene examines how authors and celebrities construct their identities across various media platforms, exploring topics ranging from Quentin Tarantino's cinematic masculinity to Roxane Gay's digital presence. His work often analyzes the performative aspects of identity in contemporary culture, particularly through fashion, social media, and visual storytelling. Greene's scholarly output demonstrates a consistent focus on authorial identity construction across media platforms. His publications reveal a trajectory from examining literary authors' fashion choices to analyzing digital performances of identity on social media, and more recently to cinematic studies of directors like Quentin Tarantino and Jordan Peele. The evolution of his work reflects broader cultural shifts toward digital and visual media while maintaining a consistent theoretical framework centered on performance and identity construction. Joyce Gentry Smoot Award (2025) for Excellence in Teaching by an Instructor As an educator, Greene has served as a reader on graduate student capstones and has been actively involved in curriculum development and pedagogical innovation. He has participated in numerous professional development activities focused on writing instruction, anti-racist pedagogy, and the integration of AI in teaching. His teaching philosophy emphasizes building student confidence in writing abilities, recognizing diverse student backgrounds, and providing individualized feedback to help students develop their unique voices. Greene is currently working on projects examining Jordan Peele's Nope (2022) regarding point-of-view and gore, as well as speculative adaptations in contemporary US media. His research interests continue to evolve with cultural trends while maintaining his core focus on performance, identity, and media representation.
University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignUnited States
John Gallagher is Associate Professor in English and Information Sciences at UIUC. His research examines how writers adapt to participatory audiences in digital environments, including social media interactions and AI writing tools. Using case studies and computational methods, he explores algorithmic audiences, ethical implications of AI, and technical communication in institutional contexts. He teaches courses in professional writing, digital rhetoric, and research methodologies. Recent projects analyze content creators' narratives about platform algorithms, inclusive emoji design, and academic integrity challenges posed by generative AI.
Imogen Forbes-Macphail is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis, specializing in the interdisciplinary intersections of nineteenth-century British poetry and mathematical thought. Her current book project, Line and Number: Formal Problems in Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Mathematics , examines how Victorian poets and mathematicians engaged with analogous formal challenges. Victorian Poetry Caucus Representative, North American Victorian Studies Association Co-Editor (with Anna Henchman), Special Issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies on women’s writing and scientific knowledge production (“Longing to Know”) Research Focus: Forbes-Macphail’s work bridges literary formalism and historical scientific methodologies, particularly exploring topics like computational proof, topological poetics, and the mysticism inherent in Victorian-era mathematical and poetic discourse. Her interdisciplinary approach highlights how mathematical concepts influenced poetic structures and vice versa. Scientific Contributions: Her publications span analyses of the Four-Color Theorem, Ada Lovelace’s literary-scientific legacy, and the gendered dynamics of 19th-century knowledge production. Key trends include the aestheticization of mathematical rigor, the role of formalism in shaping Victorian intellectual paradigms, and crossdisciplinary epistemological inquiries. Honorable Mention, “Expanding the Field” Essay Prize, Northeast Victorian Studies Association (2022) Susan Morgan Graduate Student Essay Prize, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (2019) Sally Mitchell Prize, North American Victorian Studies Association (2018) Honorable Mention, Susan Morgan Graduate Student Essay Prize (2018) Sussex-Samuel Prize, Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association (2013) Forbes-Macphail’s teaching includes courses such as ENL 164: Writing Science Publications , emphasizing the synthesis of scientific and literary communication. She previously held a Junior Fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2022–25), underscoring her prominence in Victorian studies.
Kent A. Ono is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, where he has held faculty appointments since 2012. Previously, he served as Department Chair (2012-2017) and has held leadership positions including Director of Asian American Studies at UIUC (2002-2007) and Director of Cultural Studies at UC Davis (1999-2002). He earned his PhD in Rhetorical Studies from the University of Iowa (1992), MA from Miami University (1988), and BA from DePauw University (1987). Professor Ono's research examines critical media analysis through frameworks of race, gender, sexuality, and nation. His work spans rhetorical theory, intercultural communication, and cultural studies, with emphasis on: Representations of Asian Americans in media Immigration discourse and border rhetoric Postcolonial media criticism Critical race methodologies Transnational cultural flows His recent publications demonstrate sustained focus on immigration rhetoric, racial representation in media, and critical intercultural communication. Thematic analysis reveals consistent engagement with power structures, identity negotiation, and resistance narratives across 30+ years of scholarship, with emerging work on K-pop globalization and digital culture. Awards & Honors: Presidential Citation, National Communication Association (2024) Fellow, International Communication Association (2021) Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar (2018) Distinguished Scholar Awards from NCA (2015, 2022), WSCA (2020) Teachers on Teaching Award, NCA (2015) He has held editorial leadership positions including Editor of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies and co-editor of NYU Press's Critical Cultural Communication series. As NCA President (2020), he advanced equity initiatives and disciplinary transformation. Ono founded the Asian American Cultural Politics Research Cluster at UC Davis and secured grants including 'Portraits of Courage: Photographs by Shane Sato' (2019). He teaches graduate seminars in Rhetorical Studies and International Communication.
Bruce Ackerman is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, holding one of the most prestigious academic positions at Yale. He has made significant contributions to constitutional law, political philosophy, and public policy over his distinguished career. His educational background includes an LL.B. from Yale (1967) and a B.A. from Harvard (1964). Ackerman has received numerous honors including the Henry Phillips Prize for lifetime achievement in Jurisprudence (2002), an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Milan (2023), and recognition as a Commander of the French Order of Merit. Ackerman's research focuses on American Constitutionalism, Comparative Constitutionalism, and Theories of Justice. His groundbreaking work includes the three-volume series We the People , which explores great turning points in American constitutional history. His scholarship has had global impact, influencing constitutional reforms in France, Brazil, Britain, and other countries. His recent work examines the constitutional challenges posed by the internet revolution and digital age. His publications reveal consistent engagement with constitutional crises across different nations and time periods, with particular attention to emergency powers, presidential authority, and democratic resilience. Ackerman's work connects historical constitutional development with contemporary challenges to democratic institutions. Commander of the French Order of Merit Henry Phillips Prize for lifetime achievement in Jurisprudence (2002) Honorary Doctorate from University of Milan (2023) Member of the American Law Institute Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Named Leading Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine Ackerman has advised numerous governments and constitutional bodies worldwide. His work Before the Next Attack served as basis for French constitutional reform on emergency powers, while The Stakeholder Society influenced wealth distribution reforms in Brazil and Britain. He continues to actively engage with current constitutional challenges through scholarly publications, media commentary, and direct consultation with constitutional institutions globally.
Dr. Jennifer Sclafani is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at UMass Boston . Her research focuses on identity construction , language ideologies , and political discourse .
Li Mingjiang serves as Associate Professor and Provost's Chair in International Relations at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. He concurrently holds leadership roles as PhD Programme Coordinator, Deputy Head of Graduate Studies at RSIS, and Deputy Chair of NTU's 8th Senate, while maintaining a nonresident scholar position at Carnegie China. His academic foundation includes: Ph.D. in Political Science from Boston University Specializing in Chinese foreign policy , China-ASEAN relations , and Asia-Pacific security dynamics , he has authored or edited 15 books including China’s Economic Statecraft (2017) and New Dynamics in US-China Relations (2014). His research spans global governance frameworks and Sino-U.S. strategic competition through publications in journals like Journal of Contemporary China and Chinese Journal of International Politics . Recent publications (2023-2025) reveal concentrated analysis on emerging geopolitical flashpoints including U.S.-China tensions in Southeast Asia, South China Sea confrontations, cyber nationalism commercialization, and technology policy conflicts - demonstrating consistent engagement with real-time strategic developments in the Indo-Pacific region. In his capacity as PhD Programme Coordinator, Li Mingjiang oversees graduate academic development and research supervision at RSIS, though specific student details and grant information remain unreported in public sources.
