New Faculty

Mara Mills, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, is a historian of science who works at the intersection of disability studies and media studies. Her research and teaching interests include telephone and mobile media studies; science and technology studies (STS); and disability theory. Her current book project traces the historical relationship between the telephone system, deafness, and signal processing. Other projects include a history of "talking books" and a collaborative study of the history and politics of "miniaturization" in the electronics industry. Mills comes to NYU after two years as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Erica Reyna Robles joins the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication with a recent PhD from the Department of Communication at Stanford University. Trained as both an experimental psychologist and a cultural historian, Robles' research focuses on the role media technologies play in the production of space. In particular, she concentrates on configurations that enable a sense of public, collective, or shared experience, especially through the structuring of visibility and gaze. Her current project, Mediating Eternity: The Crystal Cathedral and God's Place in a Networked World, looks at the role a traditional cultural institution, the church, plays in re-framing the communal, and sacred experience through technological appropriations of screens, automobiles, broadcast, and network technologies, alongside modern architectural materials like concrete, steel, and glass. She is currently working as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in New Media and Architecture in joint affiliation with the Department of Art History and the Humanities and Technology Laboratory (HUMLab) at the University of Umeå, in Sweden.

Victor Pickard joins the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication with a recent PhD from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois. This past year Pickard served Research Fellow on telecommunication policy at the New America Foundation, a public policy think tank in Washington, D.C. Before that, he served as a Policy Fellow for Google's inaugural summer program. His scholarship explores the intersections of media policy, activism, and communication history, and has been published in a number of journals, including the Journal of Communication; Global Media and Communication; Media, Culture & Society; New Media and Society; Journal of Communication Inquiry; International Journal of Communication Law and Policy; and Critical Studies in Media Communication.

Lisa Gitelman will hold a joint appointment as an Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and the Department of English. Gitelman is a media historian whose work focuses on media innovation and the public representation and consequent reception of new technological and media formats. Gitelman received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Previously, she served as an associate professor and director of the Media Studies Program at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. This past academic year, Gitelman was a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. Gitelman's published monographs include Scripts, Grooves, Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era, and Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. Lisa has also co-edited New Media 1740-1915 and Thomas Edison and Modern America.