Selected Graduate Student Interests
   
  Nicholas Baer earned his undergraduate degree in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago. After college, he spent two years in Berlin and Vienna as a Fulbright Scholar at Humboldt University of Berlin and as a participant in the Austrian-American Fulbright Commission’s Teaching Assistantship Program. His primary question is how relations between and among Germans, Jews, and Turks
are mediated through, and articulated in terms of, gender and sexuality in German cinema. More generally, he is interested in German cinema’s engagement with issues of national and diasporic identity; spatial and representational politics in the German context; classical and contemporary film theory; and theories of modernity, postcolonialism, race, nationhood, and corporality. He has presented at conferences at Mansfield College, Oxford, and the University of Lisbon, and his work has been published in the Midway Review, TRANSIT, and a collected volume entitled Diasporas: Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
 
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  Kris Fallon arrived at Berkeley after collecting degrees in Film from both UCLA and San Francisco State University and several aimless years spent in the world of online advertising.  His current research interests include documentary film, still photography, and various sorts of new media.  In addition to preparing for Exams, he is also the 2008-2009 curator of the Townsend Center's Depth of Field Documentary Film series and serves as Grad Student Representative to the Berkeley Center for New Media. His latest dissertation fantasy envisions a project at the crossroads of digitality, documentary film and visual historiography.  His chief hobby outside of school consists of spending time with his son Keaton while steadfastly protecting him from the deleterious effects of screen images of any sort.
 
 

Laura Horak joined the Film Studies program in 2005 and is also doing a Designated Emphasis in Gender & Women's Studies. She received her BA in Film Studies and Women's & Gender Studies at Yale University in 2003.
Her areas of interest include silent cinema in Germany, Scandinavia, and the United States; gender and sexual deviance; popular culture; passing and masquerade in film; and feminist and queer historiography.
In September 2007, she curated the series Girls Will Be Boys at the Pacific Film Archive. She is currently working on her dissertation, tentatively entitled "Girls will be Boys: Female-to-male cross-dressing in U.S. silent cinema culture." She is also co-editing an anthology, Border Crossings: Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space, with Jennifer Bean and Anupama Kapse.
 
  Sanjay P Hukku comes to Berkeley from Ann Arbor, Michigan. His interests include feminist theory, gender studies, narrative theory, and trying to match without looking like he's tried too hard. Always up for conversations about sex, fetishism, Gem and the Holograms, Virginia Woolf, and "who was wearing what when they said that to them," Sanjay hopes to combine his archival knowledge of pop culture, something theoretical about pornography, and actual video production in a semi-decent dissertation.
 
  George Larkin has written, produced, and developed film, television, and theatre.   He was the head of development and post-production supervisor on Spanking the Monkey, Flirting With Disaster, The Last Good Time, Manny & Lo, & Wigstock (collectively, award winners at the Sundance, Cannes, Berlin, Hamptons, & Avignon Film Festivals and distributed by New Line, Miramax, Sony, & Samuel Goldwyn).  He’s developed a Sony reality show and sold another to Endemol.  His plays were nominated for or won seventeen awards (including nine LA Weekly awards) and have been produced at the Lark Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Endtimes, Love Creek, the Met, Edge Fest, Theatricum Botanicum, the Unknown Theatre, Sacred Fools, the Hudson, EST, UCSD, and Yale University.  JAC will publish his thirty play GRIMM collection in 2009, and in 2008 the Grasslands Review at ISU published his article on his work with writers in Baghdad.  BA from Yale University.  MA in Shakespeare Studies from the Shakespeare Institute (University of Birmingham, England).   He’s most interested in adaptation and what digital technology has meant to production and post-production.  Details at www.asalark.com.
 
  Munira Lokhandwala is a PhD student in Film Studies at Berkeley. She holds a B.A. in Religion from Bryn Mawr College and and MA in Cultural Studies from the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her interests include experimental film and video, photography, critical race theory, performance and Diaspora. She currently serves on the Short Film screening committee for the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.
 
 

Jennifer Malkowski grew up in Chicago and spent much of her childhood watching movies. One of her earliest film memories is seeing The Godfather at age seven. She remembers her little sister asking, in a quavering voice, "Daddy, why is there a horsey's head in that man's bed?!?" Despite this early trauma, Jennifer became a Film Studies (and English) major at Oberlin College where she received her B.A.  Here at Berkeley, she writes and teaches mostly about gender and sexuality in film and about documentary.  Her dissertation topic centers on documenting death, specifically the new opportunities and taboos in that practice that accompanied the advent of video and digital technologies.
 
  Andrew Moisey is a Philadelphia kid who came to UC Berkeley in 1997 to become a capitalist. After hearing Kaja Silverman lecture, however, he was set upon a path of enlightenment and declared himself a Rhetorician and a Film Scholar. His parents, who were kind enough to have saved money for his college education, were not happy with him until the Spring of 2003 when he was admitted to the PhD program in Film Studies at his alma mater. Andrew Moisey is an avid golfer and a photography enthusiast. He lives in Oakland with his girlfriend and his cat. His favorite movie is The Big Lebowski. He is researching possibilities for documentary expression in the age of the New Media.
 
  Damon Young comes to Berkeley from the antipodean isle of Australia where the sun always shines and the water goes down the drain backwards. When not marvelling at such phenomena, he also managed there to complete degrees in film production and gender & cultural studies. He works on photography, images of violence, practices of self-portraiture, queer cinema, and the history of sex on screen (in no particular order), has an unhealthy interest in psychoanalysis and critical theory, and is currently (with Gilbert Caluya) co-editing an anthology on queer theories of love. He also never watches Desperate Housewives and avoids Facebook like the plague.
 
  Second-year Ashley White-Stern hails from Boston, MA.  She received her BA in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago where she was the recipient of a University Scholar Award and a Mellon Mays Fellowship.  Her interests include early West African cinema and questions of (trans)nationality and modernity, mid-late 20th century alternative political filmmaking in the United States, theories of the public sphere, and questions of aural and visual testimony in films dealing with human rights.  Ashley's research at UC Berkeley is supported by the Ford Foundation and a Wang Fellowship.