Selected Graduate Student Interests
   
  Amy Corbin is a fifth-year student in the department whose research focuses on race, social issues, and spectatorship in popular American cinema. Her dissertation explores the way American narrative films construct landscapes as culturally or racially distinct, and the different modes of imaginative travel these films offer the film spectator. She also devotes some time to nonprofit media projects, including the Sacred Land Film Project and May I Speak Freely?, for which she does research and writing.  Amy holds a B.A. in anthropology and literary & cultural studies from the College of William and Mary in Virginia.
 
  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.
 
  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.
 
 

Nguyen Tan Hoang is writing a dissertation on Asian American masculinity and sexual representation entitled "A View from the Bottom." Hoang's critical writings have appeared in Porn Studies (2004), Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular (2006), GLQ (2007), Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America (forthcoming), and TransAsian Screen Cultures (forthcoming). He is also an experimental
videomaker whose work has screened in such venues as the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives and numerous film festivals in the U.S. and abroad. In Fall 2005, he was a Residential Research Fellow at the University of California Humanities Research Institute.
 
  A fifth-year graduate student in Film Studies, Ara Osterweil currently is writing her dissertation, Flesh Cinema: the Corporeal Avante-Garde 1962-1972, which analyzes the relationship between discourses of sexuality and obscene imagery in American avant-garde film. She recently published an essay titled "A Fan's Notes on Camp, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Showgirls " in Film Quarterly, and her essay about Andy Warhol's avant-porn film Blow Job will appear in Pornographies On/Scene, a forthcoming anthology edited by Linda Williams. Osterweil also has presented lectures on avant-garde and trash cinema at numerous conferences, including "Desiring Detritus: Paul Morrissey's Trash " at the 2001 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Washington, D.C., "Hootchie Kootchie Kuchar: George and Mike's Trash Homage to Hollywood" at Berkeley's own Born to Be Bad conference on trash cinema in 2002, and "The Body in Pieces: Flesh Cinema in the Sixties and the Decline of the Part Object" at the 2003 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Minneapolis.
 
  A third-year graduate student in Film Studies, Amy Rust presented a paper titled "Irruptive Openings: Vietnam, The Wild Bunch, and Wounds that Speak" at the 2003 Berkeley Symposium: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Visual Representations, as well as at the fourth annual War and Culture conference in Kansas City. More generally, her work explores notions of shock and excess, particularly with regard to historical representations of violence in American cinema.
 
  Michael Sicinski is completing his dissertation on structuralist cinema, its relation to other minimalist artforms, and the challenges it poses to theories of spectatorship.  He is currently on a one-year appointment at Syracuse University.
 
  Brett Simon, a fifth-year graduate student in Film Studies currently lives in Venice, California, where he is working on a dissertation that explores the relationship between film and video. In April 2003, a Datax installation by Simon appeared at the Images Festival in Toronto, and his new video about a Karaoke romance premiered at a Los Angeles gallery in June 2003.
 
  Maria St. John, a seventh-year graduate student in Film Studies, has a background in clinical psychology and studies rhetorics of psychoanalysis across disciplines, particularly psychoanalytic constructions of race and gender and the dynamic tensions between psychoanalytic, feminist, and postcolonial theories. Her recent course, "Celluloid Cells: Representation, Incarceration, and American Cinema," examined the history and current proliferation of both prison films and the prison industrial complex in the United States. St. John is a recent recipient of the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, and her essays have appeared in Women and Therapy, Qui Parle, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. She has received support for her research from the University of California Regents and the UC Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium and is presently a fellow of the Townsend Center for the Humanities. Her forthcoming dissertation is titled The Mammy Fantasy and the Moving Picture.
  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.