FTVM Ph.D. Alumni

Grace Wilsey (Ph.D. 2026)

Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Oberlin College

Grace Wilsey is a cultural studies scholar working on structures of authority within changing technological landscapes and media industries. Her dissertation, "Thrift: How Authorship Mediates Systems of Power Amidst Technological Change," analyzes how authorship operates as an adaptive system of power within the Hollywood film industry, media convergent franchises, and Silicon Valley. She is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media at Oberlin College.

Amber Hardiman (Ph.D. 2026)

Howard R. Marsh Postdoctoral Fellow, Communication and Media Studies, University of Michigan

Amber defended her dissertation on April 14, 2026. "Premium Documentary Television and the Legitimation of Feminist Advocacy in the Digital Age" argues that changes in genre, enabled by the acceleration of media convergence across digital platforms, and growing corporate consolidation in the media industries, allows for popular, neoliberal, and care-based feminist perspectives to coexist in stream-able television docuseries about sexual violence post-#MeToo. Amber's work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada's Doctoral Fellowship, Rackham Graduate School's Doctoral Intern Fellowship, and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender's Community of Scholars Fellowship at the University of Michigan. She has published in Docalogue, In Media Res, and Feminist Media Studies, and has forthcoming work in other academic journals and edited collections about true crime, prestige media production, and the politics of the digital manosphere in contemporary sports cultures. She has served as the Graduate Student Representative for the Television Scholarly Interest Group with the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and she works closely with U-M’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center and the Michigan Collaborative to End Mass Incarceration (MI-CEMI).

Tanite Chahwan (Ph.D. 2026)

Assistant Professor of Film Studies, University of North Carolina at Wilmington

Tanite Chahwan is a film scholar and filmmaker whose work examines how melodrama and film stardom shaped ideas of gender, nationhood, and modernity in 1950s Egyptian cinema. She earned her Ph.D. in Film, Television, and Media from the University of Michigan in 2026 and joined the University of North Carolina Wilmington as Assistant Professor of Film Studies. Before pursuing her doctorate, she earned a B.A. in Filmmaking from L'Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts and an M.A. in English Literature from the American University of Beirut. Her current projects include a book on Egyptian film stardom and a feature-length documentary inspired by her archival research on Egyptian cinema.

Bailey Apollonio (Ph.D. 2026)

Visiting Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, Department of English, Dickerson College

Bailey Apollonio is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the Department of English at Dickinson College. Her research explores the relationship between media industries and fans as well as the impact of age and generation on media consumption and representation. Her current work focuses on children's media industries and their adult fans by examining kidult culture. 

Joshua Schulze (Ph.D. 2025)

Assistant Professor of Teaching, School of Writing, Literature, and FIlm, Oregon State University

Joshua Schulze teaches classes in film history, film analysis, contemporary media industries, and film criticism. His research focuses on the relationship between race and labor in film and media production cultures, and he is currently working on a book project about Hollywood’s response to the Second World War from a labor perspective, particularly in relation to location shooting. His research has appeared in American Quarterly, Screening the Past, and numerous anthologies, and has been supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Endowed Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Vincent Longo (Ph.D. 2022)

Assistant Professor of Communication, Western Michigan University

Vincent defended his dissertation on July 21, 2022. "A Hard Act to Follow: Live Performance in the Age of the Hollywood Studio System" argues that scholars should not equate the demise of vaudeville as a cultural industry in the early 1930s with the disappearance of live performance in movie theaters in the United States, which continued with much success in many large luxurious downtown theaters until the 1950s. Doing so has concealed variety theater as a critical shaping force in the industrial history of studio era Hollywood, the star system, and the experiences of theatergoers. The dissertation recasts the Hollywood studios as multimedia conglomerates (not just film companies) which came to control variety stage entertainment and create studio-run live performance circuits. These live performance circuits supported a more diverse star system, where diverse performers received star billing unlike in films of the period. These performances also make visible the experiences and tastes of audiences of color who sought out these performances. The project begins detailing the experiences of these under-researched audiences who were an important, but largely overlooked part of the movie palace experience.

Marissa Spada (Ph.D. 2022)

Marissa Spada’s dissertation, “Camera Beauty: Makeup and the Art of Image Making in Studio Era Hollywood,” explores how screen makeup developed in the American motion picture industry, and how these developments subsequently shaped normative beauty standards and practices. Between the years 1927 and 1937, the art of screen makeup underwent critical transitions attendant to the maturation of the Hollywood studio system, its increasingly realistic modes of representation, and the growing omnipresence of its star culture. Additionally, during this decade, the mass cosmetics industry grew exponentially and symbiotically alongside these changes in Hollywood, despite the economic devastation of the Great Depression. She argues that it was during these years that the relationship between beauty, makeup, and the cinema took root in American culture, alongside the growth of the Hollywood studio system, and the standardization of its technologies and creative practices.

Joseph DeLeon (Ph.D. 2020)

Assistant Professor of Integrative Studies and Digital Studies, Grand Valley State University

Joseph DeLeon defended his dissertation “Social Media at the Margins: Crafting Community Media Before the Web” on December 10, 2020. His work investigates queer and subcultural media projects from the 1970s-1990s that built what he terms “community information formats.” A community information format refers to the development of social and technical standards for building community and for fostering access to community media production during the period right before the World Wide Web. He excavates this multi-sited history through methods of cultural history including original archival analysis and oral history interviews with media producers. Incorporating research from archival collections housed at the Computer History Museum’s Shustek Research Archive in Fremont, California, and Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library in Atlanta, Georgia, Joseph’s dissertation offers a cultural history of social media before “social media” that surfaces understudied media technological visions.

Kayti Lausch (Ph.D. 2020)

Assistant Professor, School of Film and Photography, Montana State University

Kayti successfully defended her dissertation on October 23, 2020. Building a Climate of Righteousness: Religious Television Networks in American Culture uses archival sources in order to reconstruct the industrial histories of three evangelical networks (the Christian Broadcasting Network, American Christian Television System, and the Trinity Broadcasting Network) in order to understand how these broadcasters have fundamentally shaped American culture and politics. This project brings together the methods of media industry studies, television studies, and cultural history and mixes an analysis of archival material with national and local newspapers, magazines, books, and trade journals, as well as textual and discursive analyses of networks’ programs, schedules, and promotional material. She argues that these networks successfully created and nurtured a new demographic of television viewers encouraged to define themselves as counter to the mainstream because of their religious and moral values, and reveals how religious broadcasters capitalized on cultural fragmentation in order to carve out space for socially conservative television.

Richard Mwakasege-Minaya (Ph.D. 2019)

Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies at the Department of Race, Ethnic, and Gender Studies, University of Missouri-Kansas City

Richard successfully defended his dissertation, "Exiled Counterpoints: Cuban Exile Media Activism and Conservative Latinidad" in May of 2019. His work explores the media activism of first-wave Cuban exiles and the strategies they deployed to shape U.S. media from the 1960s-1970s. The Truth About Cuba Committee (TACC) chiefly led this phenomenon and formed coalitions with Cuban organizations and U.S. conservative advocates and broadcasters. Cuban media activists sought to pit the media, the state, and public opinion in the U.S. against the Castro regime. For this project, Richard relied on archival materials from the Cuban Heritage Collection, namely the TACC collection and the Luis V. Manrara papers, as well as periodicals, advertisements, government documents, and press releases. To examine these materials, he drew from the media theory and models of transnationalism.