Student Biographies
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Michael Anderson is a third–year joint PhD candidate in the film studies and history of art programs. Michael has a M.A. in Cinema Studies from New York University and a B.A. in European Studies from Hillsdale College (MI). Among other fields, Michael’s areas of emphasis and specialized focus include the classical Hollywood cinema, the French New Wave, contemporary world cinema, popular Indian cinema and classical Japanese cinema. Michael’s thematic and theoretical interests range from the topics of classicism and authorship to the subject of religion in cinema and the writings of Andre Bazin. He has published or delivered papers on films by Howard Hawks, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Abbas Kiarostami, James Benning and Michael Mann. Michael is beginning dissertation research on the cinema of Hawks. Outside of academia, Michael is married and is an avid ice hockey fan (and was a former player in his native Minnesota).
Claudia Calhoun joined the joint program in American Studies and Film Studies in 2008. A native of Houston, Texas, Claudia earned her B.A. in American Studies from Mount Holyoke College in 2005. In the intervening years, she worked in nonprofit fundraising in Washington, DC. Claudia's research interests include 20th century US history, gender studies, and classical Hollywood cinema.
Ryan Cook entered the joint PhD program in Film Studies and East Asian Languages & Literatures in 2006 after completing Yale’s MA program in East Asian Studies. His primary fields are Japanese cinema and modern Japanese literature. Research interests include Japanese film history, cinematic modernisms (particularly in Japan in the interwar and postwar periods), cinematic transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, cinema and sexuality, French, German and American cinema, film theory and media theory, Kadokawa Films and the Japanese ‘blockbuster,’ and the writings of Inagaki Taruho. Before coming to Yale, Ryan lived and worked in northern Japan through the JET program as a junior high school English teacher. He holds a BA from Cornell and an MA from Georgetown University.
Victor Fan (joint with Comparative Literature) is a composer, sound editor and director for film and theatrical pieces. He was the Artistic Director of the experimental theater group, Post [ET]2! in Hong Kong (1991–1997). His film, The Well, was premiered at the Anthology Film Archives in 2000, presented by Sony Music at the Japan Society in 2001. It was then screened at the Oshima Retrospect at George Eastman House in 2002, and the São Paolo International Film Festival. His most recent project is a feature about Pier Paolo Pasolini. His dissertation is titled “Football and Opium: Language, Image, and Sovereignty from Antiquity to the Global Zoetrope.” It investigates the relationship between the law and sovereignty by tracing the thematic strands of opium and football as elements of instantiation and exchange between “England” and “China” in literature, cinema, and global media. His areas of specialization include post–classical Hollywood cinema, global action cinemas, Japanese cinema, cinemas and literature of “China(s)” and Chinese Diaspora, interactive media and its global dissemination, European film theory, juridico–political philosophy, post–colonial theory, gender and queer studies, and sports and politics. Victor Fan’s webite.
Josh Glick (joint with American Studies) received his BA from Cornell University in English and Aesthetics/Architecture/Media Studies. Before coming to Yale, he worked as a researcher in the Library of Congress: Motion Picture, Broadcasting & Recorded Sound Division and as a paralegal in the law firm Storch, Amini & Munves, P.C. His academic interests are focused on the relationship between cinema and urban environments, American documentary film, cinema and the public sphere, and historical representation through cinema.
Seung–hoon Jeong earned an MA in French Literature and worked as a film critic in South Korea, before joining Yale's Film Studies and Comparative Literature program in 2005. His literary interests are informed by continental critical theories including the philosophy and systems theory, literature and other arts/media, and (post) modernist fiction/culture. In cinema, his interests range from film theory in general to various fields such as experimental film and contemporary Hollywood. A winner of the 2007 Domitor essay award on early cinema, Seung–hoon has also explored ontological relations of cinema to the animal, the ghost, the body, and so on, presenting or publishing papers on Herzog/Bazin, Deleuze/Rancière, Mallarmé/Fassbinder, Greenaway/Bill Morrison, Henry James/Apichatpong, Haneke/suture, Rossellini/body, Freud/interface, Korean modernism, Korean horror, etc. Along with these subjects, his current researches on digital indexicality and the cinema of catastrophe are more or less related to his dissertation “Cinematic Interfaces: Retheorizing Apparatus, Image, Subjectivity,” a reconfiguration of film theories through a variety of films visualizing interfaces on screen, and partly via new media studies.
Jamicia Lackey is a second-year Ph.D. student joint with African American Studies. She received a B.A. in African and African American Studies from Duke, an associate’s degree in Media Production from AIU-Buckhead and a master’s in Africana studies from Cornell. Her interests include African diasporic film, Third Cinema and “Third World” political filmmaking, postcolonial theory, and embodiment. She also loves watching sports and horror movies, writing, knitting, playing puzzle games online and collecting interesting quotes from friends.
Cécile Lagesse was born in Mauritius and raised in France, where she received a B.A. and M.A. in Chinese from the National Institute of Languages and Civilizations and a B.A. and M.A. in film at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. In 2003, she was editor-in-chief of the online art magazine Arsinica and wrote on Chinese contemporary artists visiting Paris. She particularly had a critical interest in the works of film director Jia Zhang-ke, whom she has since personally interviewed and written about academically. Her most recent article, “Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life: Realism in the Age of the Digital” was published in the December 2008 issue of Cahiers du Cinéma. Cécile studied at the Beijing Film Academy in 2005 and entered the Combined Ph.D. program in Film Studies and East Asian Languages and Literatures in 2007. She has a zealous interest in film theory, specifically issues of realism, representation, technology, and political critique, and her current intellectual focus is on contemporary Chinese independent films. In her spare time, Cecile enjoys frequenting local restaurants.
Alice Lovejoy (joint degree with Comparative Literature) graduated in 2001 from Brown University with honors in Documentary Studies and Social Issues. She spent the academic year 2003–2004 as a Fulbright fellow at FAMU, the Prague film academy, and has also worked as managing editor of Film Comment magazine, a film critic and programmer, and a filmmaker. Her research interests center on nonfiction film and literature, world cinema, the cultural history of East Central Europe, and cinema’s intersections with history, politics, and the state. In 2007–2008 she was a Fulbright–Hays fellow in Prague, where she conducted research for her dissertation on the Czechoslovak Army’s film studio between 1951 and 1971.
Miriam Posner (joint with American Studies) is a native of San Jose, California, who graduated from Reed College in 2001. Her dissertation examines cultures of exhibition in twentieth–century American medicine. Miriam’s other interests include early silent film, the cultural history of capitalism, the visual culture of medicine, and theories of spectatorship. Miriam has presented her work at forums including the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Harvard University's Conference on the History of Capitalism in North America, the Joint Atlantic Seminar on the History of Medicine, and the Film and History annual conference. An article of Miriam’s, “Communicating Disease: Tuberculosis, Narrative, and Social Order in Thomas Edison’s Red Cross Seal Films,” is slated to be published in Learning with the Lights Off: An Educational Film Reader (Oxford, 2010).
Patrick Reagan was born and raised in Bakersfield, California. Seeking increasingly denser cities he moved to Irvine to pursue a BA in Film and Media Studies from the University of California and then to Berlin where he studied at Humboldt Universität. Next was Los Angeles where he worked for a small advertising firm, editing movie trailers and television commercials. Though presenting a break from this migratory logic, he relocated to New Haven in the fall of 2008, entering the combined Film Studies and German Studies Ph.D.
program. His research interests include psychoanalytic theory, ideologies of montage and filmic representations of political authority and the body in pain.
He has also been known to make a short video here and there.
Raisa Sidenova joined Yale’s Film Studies program in 2008 (joint with the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures). Her academic interests include documentary film, cinema and ideology, history of Hollywood film, Russian–American cultural relations, gender and cultural studies. In her master’s thesis, entitled “Mother Russia and Her Daughters,” Raisa tried to combine these interests in exploration of representations of Soviet women in American film during WWII. Raisa holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Moscow State University and a master’s degree in American Studies from Lehigh University, which she attended as a recipient of the Fulbright scholarship.
Jennifer Stob (joint PhD with History of Art) received her B.A. with honors in French and Art History from Grinnell College in 2000. Before joining Yale’s Film Studies Program in 2003 she lived, worked, and studied in France and Germany. Her research focuses on the Situationist International’s involvement with cinema—their theories, critiques and contestations of the moving image. Her wider interests in the discipline include experimental and essayistic film–making of the 1920s and 1960s, militant documentary and the fashioning of subjectivity in modern art and film.
Richard Suchenski is a joint–Ph.D. candidate in Film Studies and History of Art, whose work focuses primarily on the development of cinematic modernism internationally and on the relationship between film and the other arts. Major research interests include avant–garde cinema, Japanese cinema, auteur studies, European cinemas (particularly France and Germany), Chinese–language cinemas, the history of photography, and 19th and 20th century painting and sculpture. His dissertation is entitled Utopian Romanticism and the Poetics of Scale: Modernist Explorations of the Cinematic Long Form. He is also working on a formal history of Japanese experimental film.
Jeremi Szaniawski joined the combined Film and Slavic Studies PhD program at Yale in 2004. He got his BA in Film and Modern Literatures (English and Russian) and MA in Performing Arts from the ULB (Free University of Brussels). Jeremi’s publications include an interview with Russian director Alexander Sokurov—his dissertation topic at Yale. Jeremi is also interested in popular cinema and has taught Horror film in Yale Summer Film Institute. Jeremi is also the lead curator of the Slavic Film Colloquium and a founder of the Cinema at the Whitney. When he is not studying or watching them, Jeremi likes to make films himself, although you can also find him on the Yale tennis courts, weather permitting.
Takuya Tsunoda joined the Combined Ph.D. program in Film Studies and East Asian Languages and Literatures in 2008, after completing a B.A. in Film Studies and an M.A. in Japanese Literature at Columbia University in New York, where he also working at Merchant Ivory Productions and DCTV. His research interests center on Japanese cinema and media culture, particularly on spectatorship, perceptual transformation in Japanese modernity, and film theory in Japan and its parallels with European intellectual discourses. His other interests include cinematic representation/technology, and intellectual history, intermedial aesthetics, national/ auteur cinema and film festivals. A native of Osaka, Japan, he also received a B.A. from Waseda University in Tokyo.
Grant Wiedenfeld joined the departments of Comparative Literature and Film Studies in 2007. He earned an MFA in Film at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and bachelor degrees from La Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) & the University of Colorado at Boulder. He studies early modernist art from France and the Americas, alongside inquiries into aesthetics and hermeneutics. A native of Des Moines, Iowa, he adores being in the out of doors.
Naoki Yamamoto joined the combined PhD program between Film Studies and East Asian Languages and Literatures in 2005 after receiving his B.A. and M.A. in Art History (with a specialty in Japanese cinema) from Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. Intellectually drawn to the relationship of cinema to its cultural, historical, and political contexts, he has published articles in Japanese on such topics as the German/Japanese wartime co–production, Japanese New Wave films of the 1960s, and recent Hollywood blockbuster films. He has also translated numerous essays on film into Japanese, aiming to provoke intellectual exchanges between scholars in the US and Japan. He is currently at work on his dissertation, which deals with the emergence and development of realist film theory and practice in Japan from the 1930s to the 1950s. Through his scholarship, he seeks to contribute constructively to the field of cross cultural film studies. Aside from his academic pursuits, Naoki is a semi–professional chef specializing in Spanish and Japanese cuisines. He also loves music from the ‘60s and the ‘80s and continues playing the drums and the bass guitar during his free time.
