MA Supervisor

Sojung Bahng is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker and researcher. She is an Assistant Professor in Media and Performance Production in the Department of Film and Media and the DAN School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University in Canada. Her main research interest lies in practice-based research and research-creation in the context of cinematic and digital media storytelling. Sojung has been exploring the creation of new artistic and narrative experiences by combining various digital technologies in cultural and philosophical contexts. Her research is multidisciplinary and collaborative; it combines various disciplines, including film & media studies, visual art, philosophy and human-computer interaction (HCI). Sojung holds a PhD from SensiLab in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University in Australia, and her doctoral thesis Cinematic VR as a reflexive tool beyond empathy was awarded the 2020 Mollie Holman award for the best thesis of the year. She graduated from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) with a master’s degree in Culture Technology and holds a BFA from Korea National University of Arts (K-Arts), majoring in TV & Film Production and Art Theory.

Research Interest:  Digital Storytelling, Cinematic Virtual Reality, New Media Narrative & Aesthetics, Multidisciplinary Art, Practice-based Research, Research-Creation

I am an Associate Professor in the Film and Media department of Queen’s University and co-director (with F. Grandena, U of Ottawa) of the inter-university research group EPIC (Esthétique et politique de l’image cinématographique). My research interests are centered around Indigenous film and poetry, Quebec cinema, road movies, transnational cinemas and oral practices of cinema. I am  presently the lead researcher for one of the Archive Counter Archive research project (financed by SSHRC) on Arnait Video Productions collective of Inuit women. My latest publications include book chapters on the rock group U2 (Mackenzie and Iversen, 2021) and on the exploration of Indigenous lands (Cahill and Caminati, 2020) as well as an article on Indigenous women and testimonies (Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 2020) an article on Québécois cinema and Americanité (American Review of Canadian Studies, 2019) and a book chapter on Canadian and Québécois Indigenous cinemas (Oxford Handbook to Canadian Cinema, 2019). In terms of supervision, I am interested in film history, film criticism, Indigenous, Québécois and transnational cinemas, cinema and landscapes, as well as documentary filmmaking and road movies from around the world (especially women on the road).

Dr. Mél Hogan is the host of The Data Fix podcast (thedatafix.net) and Director of the Environmental Media Lab (EML) (environmentalmedialab.com). As of 2024, she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen's University. Her research focuses on data infrastructure, extractive AI, and genomic media, each understood from within the contexts of planetary catastrophe and collective anxieties about the future. For more: http://melhogan.com.

Gary Kibbins is the Associate Head for Queen's Film and Media. Gary is a media artist and writer, currently teaching at Queen’s University. Until 2000 he taught at the California Institute of the Arts. A book of essays and scripts was published in 2005: Grammar & Not-Grammar: Selected Scripts and Essays by Gary Kibbins, ed. A. J. Paterson, YYZ Books, Toronto; 2005; 254 pp.  

garykibbins.com

Cinema and media arts areas include gendered spaces and the city, women’s and Canadian cinemas,  and Cuban cinema and visual culture; decolonial practice; media archives and their remediation, social ecology of vulnerable media, collectives and collections; curatorial projects; media arts artists’ groups and artist-run centres.

After completing my PhD in Communications at McGill University, I went to Scotland to undertake a post-doctoral fellowship on minor national cinemas at the University of Glasgow. Before coming to Queen’s, I taught at universities in the UK and Canada. At Queen’s, I have taught courses on Classical Hollywood cinemas; Arctic transnational cinemas; transnational European cinemas; film manifestos; film and media theory; Culture and Technology; and popular music and cultural studies, among others.

My work explores the activity of both new and old media systems, and particularly the instances in which its messiness becomes more evident: the fringe genres, precarious objects, and pirate practices. I often resort to forms of Research-Creation through independent curatorial endeavors that engage with experimental and vernacular moving images. My previous projects mobilize subjects such as media façades, hyper-ephemeral video, 3D printing and scanning, videogame emulation, VR, and generative coding. As an author, I have published on the subjects of image, space, and technology. My most recent books are the monograph "Movie Circuits: Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology" (Amsterdam University, 2019) and the edited collection “Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies” (Oxford University, 2020). I am also the co-coordinator of the Besides the Screen research network and festival. Currently, I am working on an exhibition project about virtual museums and on a monograph about digital replicas and cultural heritage.

As a media scholar working at the intersections of race, queer, and feminist studies, my research focuses on how media performances define and defy conceptions of Asian/Asian diasporic bodies. Drawing on transnational cultural histories, I theorize resistance, complicity, and ambivalence in new border crossings facilitated by digital media. I am interested in the performance of media technologies. As such, my scholarship traverses the areas of digital media, popular culture, and media installation. My research seeks to establish a multidirectional relationship between medium and content. That is, I am interested how tangible technological objects and their processes, embodied practices around media technologies, and the content communicated through media work together. In the digital age, the ideas of media as immaterial, virtual, and transcendent dominate. My work pushes against this impulse by grounding the body, the material, and the haptic.

My Research-Creation work centres on making visible and legible obfuscated urban histories. In the interactive documentary Jerusalem, We Are Here we digitally reinscribed the Palestinians who were expelled during the 1948 war onto their neighborhoods and homes. In The Belle Park Project we look at environmental and colonial violence, but also re-naturalization, abundance and resilience in a Kingston city park that used to be a landfill. In the past ten years I have primarily worked within participatory and collaborative frameworks (in both my artistic practice and my academic writing). My focus is on interactive and augmented documentary, alongside cultural and other interventions in situ (guided walks, art installations, etc.). 

I am interested in supervising students who work on expansive manifestations of documentary cinema, post and decolonial media practices, anti-extraction culture, feminist methods, and ethics in media. I am also happy to supervise students who work on Middle Eastern cinemas and medias, and students focussed on settler accountability on Turtle Island.  

Jenn E Norton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media, specializing in 3D animation, augmented reality, and video installation. 

Her research interests center on the politics of visuality (including cinema, television, video, and other new media/art forms), critical media infrastructure, and environmental media. She examines media’s textual, material, and socio-political dynamics mainly through China's situated experience but gradually expands to explore the trans-regional linkages across Asia. Her current book project, Frontier Vision: The Geopolitics of Seeing China’s Borderlands, examines how China’s geopolitical aspirations have been hyper-mediated and entangled with the logic of frontier-making between the mid-twentieth century and the present. This book offers a transhistorical view of the visual regimes that recalibrate natural environments and their political promises through geological extraction, televisual mediation of hydropower, and maritime signal sovereignty. Her book project was also supported by the Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowships in China Studies (2024-2025) from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Emily Pelstring is full-time faculty in the Department of Film and Media, where her teaching areas include video, performance, sound, animation, experimental media, and music video studies.  Her courses are built around creative exploration and collaboration, and she aims to facilitate a laboratory or workshop environment for students.