NETWORKED ENVIRONMENTS

Pepper Stetler studies late nineteenth and early twentieth-century art and visual culture of Europe.  She is working on a book manuscript, “Stop Reading! Look!: Modern Vision and the Weimar Photographic Book,” that investigates a number of photographic books published during Germany's Weimar Republic (1918-1933) that attempt to create a new visual language through photography.  She has received funding for her research from the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the Getty Research Institute, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. “Networked Environments” is helping her think through issues of media transformation and cultural change.  She is particularly interested in how the intermingling of “new” and "old" media effect cognitive and perceptual practices. 

Susan V. Spellman is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century American business and technology.  She has published articles on the business and cultural function of traveling grocery salesmen and women as consumers of automobile culture.  She has been a fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, and the Library of Congress, and she has received grants from the American Historical Association and the Massachusetts Historical Society.  Her work on the trade and credit networks traveling salesmen crafted in the expanding commercial economy of the nineteenth century informs her participation in the Altman program.  She is currently completing a book on the business innovativeness of independent grocers.

Braxton Soderman studies digital media, video games, and the history of analog and digital technologies. He is working on a book manuscript which extends his dissertation, Interpreting Video Games through the Lens of Modernity. He recently received an ACLS/Mellon Recent Doctoral Recipient Fellowship where he began a new project studying the history of the representation of clouds through early photography to contemporary video games and networked systems. For the Altman project he is investigating the cultural and technical rise of cloud computing and the use of the figure of the cloud in contemporary and historical network diagrams of the Internet.  

Glenn W. Muschert joined Miami’s Department of Sociology and Gerontology in 2003, after a one-year appointment on the Law and Society Faculty at Purdue University.  He studies crime and social problems, including the mass media framing of high profile crimes, school shootings, missing persons, and social control through surveillance technologies.  His research has appeared in a variety of journals in sociology, criminology, and media studies.  He is co-editor (with Massimo Ragnedda, University of Sassari, Italy) of The Digital Divide in International Context (Routledge) and co-editor (with Johanna Sumiala, University of Helsinki, Finland) of Mediatized Violence (Emerald), which examines the media facets of school shooting phenomena in a variety of countries.

Vitaly Chernetsky is Associate Professor of Russian, Director of Film Studies, and Affiliate of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Jewish Studies.  A native of Ukraine, he received his education at Moscow State University, Duke University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to coming to Miami, he taught at Columbia and Northeastern Universities, and he held postdoctoral fellowships at Cornell and Harvard.  Chernetsky is the author of Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization(McGill-Queen's UP, 2007) and the editor or co-editor of several volumes: Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry (2000) the annotated Ukrainian edition of Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (2007); and a special issue of the online journal KinoKultura.  His current scholarly projects include a book on displaced writers and their relationships to diasporic communities.

Ron Becker, Professor of Media and Communication and Strategic Communication in the Department of Media, Journalism & Film, studies the relationships among media (especially television), culture, and the politics of sexual identity. He is the author of Gay TV and Straight America (Rutgers 2006) and co-author of Media and Culture: Mass Communication in a Digital Age (Bedford 2015). His essays have appeared in TheTelevision Studies Reader, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, and The Craft of Media Criticism. His current project examines the growing influence of multicultural empowerment narratives in U.S. media culture. 

P. Renée Baernstein is Professor of History and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Science. She specializes in the history of Renaissance Italy, particularly gender, religion, and family.  She is the author of A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan (Routledge 2002) as well as articles in many journals.  She has been a Fulbright fellow, fellow of the American Academy in Rome, Visiting Professor at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti Center in Florence, and recipient of the Ohio Academy of History’s Distinguished Teaching Award.  Her next book, “Strangers at Home,” is about noble women and family politics in sixteenth-century Italy.

Cynthia Klestinec, Professor of English, studies the history of science and medicine in Renaissance Italy. She is the author of Theaters of Anatomy: Students, Teachers and Traditions of Dissection in Renaissance Venice (Johns Hopkins 2011) and numerous essays. She is co-editor of Professors, Physicians and Practices in the History of Medicine: Essays in Honor of Nancy Siraisi (Springer 2017) and co-curator and co-editor of Art, Faith, and Medicine in Tintoretto’s Venice, an exhibition held in the Scuola Grande di San Marco in Venice (2019). Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Villa i Tatti-Harvard University, and the Delmas Foundation.