2026

Katherine Contess
Moving Images and Moving Bodies: Mediating Fitness in America from Postwar to Present
Lynne Joyrich (director), Gertrud Koch, Lukas Rieppel

2025

Elizabeth Garcia
Touch, Death, Work: Film Form and the Creation of Images
Ellen Rooney (director), Joan Copjec, Jinying Li

Julia Marie Huggins
Politics of Scatter: Dust and Forensic Media

Heather Lawrence
Rendering Justice: Media, Testimony, and Witnessing in the American Court of Public Opinion

Alex Maxwell
Live Ghosts Now and Direct Messages From the Past: Screenlives and the Temporality of Ghosting
Jinying Li (director), Lynne Joyrich, Ellen Rooney

Kayci Merrittee
A Pinch of This: Black (Culinary) Secrecy
Lynne Joyrich (director), Ellen Rooney, Matthew Guterl, Keisha Khan-Perry

Sherena Razek
Nakba Ecologies: On Elemental Intifada in Colonized Palestine

Stephen Woo
The Real Form of Trauma
Joan Copjec (director), Jinying Li,  Lynne Joyrich

2024

Austin, Arlen William
The Work of Media Consumption: Value Theory, Mass Media and Labor in 70s feminism and the new digital economy

Rowson, Rose Katherine Maude
My Baby is a Computer: Personal Devices, Obstetric Technologies, Historical Critique

2023

Irina Kalinka
The Political Imaginary of User Democracy
Amanda Anderson (director), Gertrud Koch (director), Wendy Chun, Bonnie Honig

Théo Lepage-Richer
Neural Media: Ascribing, Animating, and Artificializing Intelligence
Wendy Chun (director), Gertrud Koch, Lukas Rieppel

2022

Kareem Estefan
Witnessing as Worldbuilding: Practicing Decolonization in Palestinian Moving Images
Ariella Azoulay (director), Wendy Chun, Beshara Doumani, Bonnie Honig

2021

Matthew Ellis
The Return of History: Twenty-First Century American Cinema and the Crisis of
Neoliberalism
Philip Rosen (director), Wendy Chun, Lynne Joyrich

Cassandra Xin Guan
Maladaptive Media: Life and Other Political Emergencies
Philip Rosen (director), Joan Copjec, Gertrud Koch

Tyler Theus
Affirmed at the Margins: Lacunary Realism in Contemporary Film and Film Theory
Joan Copjec (director), Lynne Joyrich, Philip Rosen

2020

Jane’a Johnson-Farnham
Lynching and the Archive: A History
Ariella Azoulay (director), Lynne Joyrich, Douglas Nickel

Seungyeon Gabrielle Jung
Toward a Utopia Without Revolution:  Developmentalism, Globalization, and Design
Ellen Rooney (director), Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Chun, Jinying Li

Nathan Lee
Post-Cinema and the Question of Critique
Ellen Rooney (director), Joan Copjec, Philip Rosen

Thomas Patrick Pringle
The Climate Proxy: Digital Cultures of Global Warming
Wendy Chun (director), Ariella Azoulay, Gertrud Koch

Mikhail Skoptsov
Cinema’s Unstable Texts: A Historical Analysis of Textual Variation in the Film Industry
Philip Rosen (director), Ariella Azoulay, Lynne Joyrich

2019

Kenneth Berger
Reinventions of Life: The Cinematic Avant-Gardes in the Age of Spectacle and Biopower.
Philip Rosen (director), Joan Copjec, Ellen Rooney, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

Beth Capper
Collective Housework: Post-1970s Feminist Media Cultures and the Crisis of Social Reproduction.
Rebecca Schneider (director), Lynne Joyrich, Ellen Rooney

2018

Lakshmi Padmanabhan
The Untimely Image:  On Feminist Inactivism and Postcolonial Ethics
Leela Gandhi (director), Ellen Rooney (director), Ariella Azoulay, Rebecca Schneider

2017

Michael Ian Litwack
Racial Technics: Media and Machines in the Long Civil Rights Era
Ellen Rooney (director), Wendy Chun, Lynne Joyrich 

Seth Barry Water
The Human Figure on Film: Natural, Pictorial, Institutional, Fictional
Philip Rosen (director), Ellen Rooney, Gertrud Koch

2016

Andrew Lison
Convergent Reverberations: The Newness of Media at the End of History
Wendy Chun (director), Philip Rosen, Timothy Bewes

Rijuta Ravindra Mehta
The Anticolonial Snapshot: South Asian Disruptions
Ellen Rooney (director), Ariella Azoulay, Bonnie Honig, Leela Gandhi

Brandeise Latoi Monk-Payton
Dark Optics: Blackness, Public Exposure, and Celebrity Image in Television and New Media Culture
Lynne Joyrich (director), Matthew Gutterl, Barrymore Bogues 

2015

Joshua Morse Guilford
Homeless Movies:  The Redemptive Project of the New American Cinema
Mary Ann Doane (director), Philip Rosen, Wendy Chun

Hunter Reed Hargraves
Viscerally Uncomfortable TV: Affective Spectatorship and Televisual Neoliberalism
Lynne Joyrich (director), Wendy Chun, Rebecca Schneider, Laurie Ouellette

2014

Margaret DeKoven Hennefeld
Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes 
(Winner of the Pembroke Center award - The Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize for an outstanding dissertation in an area of feminist studies.) 
Philip Rosen (director), Mary Ann Doane, Ellen Rooney

Matthew David Noble-Olson
Late Cinema: Avantgarde, Medium, Capital
Mary Ann Doane (director), Philip Rosen, Ellen Rooney 

Mauro Resmini
The Failure of Fantasy: Genre and Form in Contemporary Film
Mary Ann Doane (director), Massimo Riva, Philip Rosen

2013

Aniruddha Maitra
Narcissism and the Scene of Reading: Towards a Global Politics of Local Aesthetics
Lynne Joyrich (director), Rey Chow, Wendy Chun, Mary Ann Doane 

2012

Anna Fisher
Feminist Impositions: Performing Parasites in Contemporary Digital and Performance Art
Wendy Chun (director), Lynne Joyrich, Rebecca Schneider, José Muñoz

Linda Liu
Images between Images: Cinematic Inventions of the Everyday
Philip Rosen (director), Mary Ann Doane, Lynne Joyrich

Pooja Rangan (finished in 2011 - received degree in 2012)
Automatic Enthnography: Otherness, Indexicality and Humanitarian Visual Media
(Winner of the Pembroke Center award - The Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize for an outstanding dissertation in an area of feminist studies.)
Rey Chow (director), Mary Ann Doane, Wendy Chun

Paige Sarlin
Interview-Work: The Genealogy of a Cultural Form
Philip Rosen (director), Lynne Joyrich, Ellen Rooney

Matthew Tierney
The Projector Rests On A Pile Of Books: Void And Medium In Postwar U.S. Culture
Ellen Rooney (director), Rey Chow, Daniel Kim, Michael Silverman

2011

Kia Afra
Hollywood’s Trade Organizations: How Competition and Collaboration Forged A Vertically-Integrated Oligopoly, 1915-1928
Philip Rosen (director), Mary Ann Doane, Lynne Joyrich

David Bering-Porter
Undead: Bodies and Codes of Uncanny Vitality in the Media of Late Capitalism
Philip Rosen (director), Rey Chow, Wendy Chun, Mary Ann Doane

Braxton Soderman (finished in 2010 - received degree in 2011)
Playing With Media Histories: Video Games Through the Lens of Modernity and Modern Media
Wendy Chun (director), Mary Ann Doane, Philip Rosen

2010

Erika Balsom
Exhibiting Cinema: The Moving Image in Art after 1990
Mary Ann Doane (director), Wendy Chun, Philip Rosen

Eugenie Brinkema
The Form of the Affect: Grief, Disgust, Anxiety, and Joy in Film and Critical Theory
Mary Ann Doane (director), Rey Chow, Ellen Rooney

Julie Levin Russo 
Indiscrete Media: Television/Digital Convergence and Economies of Online Lesbian Fan Communities.
Lynne Joyrich (director), Wendy Chun, Philip Rosen

Michael Loren Siegel
Roma De Profundis: Post-Economic Miracle Rome and the Films of Dario Argento (1970-1982)
Mary Ann Doane (director), Philip Rosen, Massimo Riva

2009

Marc Steinberg
The Emergence of the Anime Media Mix: Character Communication and Serial Consumption
Mary Ann Doane (director), Philip Rosen, Thomas Lamarre

2006

Tess Takahashi
Impure Film: Medium Specificity and the North American Avant-Garde (1965-2005)

2004

Karl Schoonover 
The Visual Made Visible: Neorealism and the Graphic Image