Media Studies Program

This thesis investigates why music streaming services are so popular, beyond their affordability, and the ways in which streaming is shifting music culture. Certain aspects of listening culture which we tend to understand as originating from streaming services, specifically the...

Gender remains a primary issue in the culinary, area, and a diachronic analysis of the portrayal of women in food media highlights the role that representation plays in both reinforcing and easing this divide. By examining the personas of Julia...

Throughout the 1990s-2000s, the number of international adoptions into the United States increased drastically, reaching a little over 20,000 international adoptions in 2002 with 25% being from China and 9% from South Korea (PRB, 2003). As these adoptees begin to...

The lesbian/queer female audience has a history of being elated with news that its community will be represented on the small screen, then grossly disappointed with how it's represented. For many lesbian, bisexual, and queer women, especially those lacking a...

In <em>Tangled Memories</em>: <em>The Vietnam War, the Aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering, </em>Marita Sturken discusses the shaping of cultural memory in the U.S. in the context of the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic. She writes that...

My project explores the role of fashion in the commercialization of the Surrealist movement and the lasting impact of Surrealist language and imagery on the landscape of fashion design. Drawing on my survey and analysis of the history of the...

Within the last few decades, cyberpunk has burgeoned in various fields of art, literature, and cinema. "Techno-Orientalism," the depiction of the "orient" in a digitalized environment, has been a major theme in cyberpunk. In works like Neal Stephenson's <em>Snow Crash </em>...

It is through visual storytelling style, Francois Truffaut believed, that a director's expressive tendencies could be seen, imprinting a work with their signature style. In the world of television, collaboration is key and production's industrial processes tend to erase the...

The thesis explores how the tactile aspect of "Subway Therapy," a project in which people could write messages on sticky notes after the 2016 Presidential Election and post them on the subway walls in New York City, fosters an alternative...