Faculty Profile: Dr. Golden Owens, Cinema & Media Studies

Golden M. Owens explores and teaches about representations of race and gender, artificial intelligence, haunting, popular culture, and racialized sounds and voices. Her current book project examines intelligent virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana, contending that these aides evoke and are haunted by Black women slaves, servants, and houseworkers in the United States The project demonstrates this haunting through analyzing popular 20th and 21st-century media depictions of Black female domestic workers, robotic and/or artificially intelligent servants/helpers, labor-saving products and devices, and contemporary virtual aides.

Dr. Owens' work appears in Sounding Out! and has been accepted by the Journal for Cinema and Media Studies. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation (via the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine), the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (f.k.a. the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, Northwestern University's Office of Fellowships, and Northwestern University's Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. 

As the newest faculty member within Cinema & Media Studies, Dr. Owens also has the most recent experience moving through higher education to earn a professorship.  To hear her experiences and how she decided to pursue a PhD and professorship, click this link to hear her interview with HAS, featured on our April 2024 ENewsletter.

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Steve Groening

Faculty Profile: Prof. Stephen Groening, Cinema & Media Studies

You’re writing a book about television and philosophy. Where do they intersect? 

The short answer is: “no television, no postmodern theory.” Television’s ability to instantaneously transmit images and sounds from distant places changed how we thought of reality and led to the rise of such concepts like simulation. Rather than rehearse debates about mass media and its influence, the book explores television as something that has ontological and epistemological implications that haven’t really been grappled with in the field.

 

Diana Ruiz

Faculty Profile: Prof. Diana Ruiz, Cinema & Media Studies

Professor Diana Flores Ruíz comes to us from the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned her PhD in film and media studies.  Her current book project explores the visual technologies (from cartography to biometrics) that have been used to draw and redraw the US-Mexican border, how they work to maintain settler colonial power relations, and how Latinx artists and activities have enacted visual forms of resistance.

 

Shawn Wong

Faculty Profile: Professor Shawn Wong, English

Professor Shawn Wong was featured in Sound Bite, a podcast network from The Daily of the UW.  You can listen to the "How Do I Get Your Job" segment featuring Professor Wong from autumn quarter 2020 here: Screenwriting with Shawn Wong (Americanese)