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Graduate Student Profiles (D-J)
Damon Di Cicco is a doctoral student and teaching assistant, specializing in Political Communication. He earned an M.A. in Communication from the University of Washington in 2008. Prior to graduate school, Damon helped found an independent arts, politics and culture newspaper in Seattle and spent several years as an editor and political writer for this publication. He is interested in many aspects of the mass media and their intersection with politics in America, particularly in how journalists have covered and affected public perceptions of political protests over the last several decades, the subject of his masters' thesis. He looks forward to further developing his research in this area, as well as developing a broader knowledge of other contemporary mass communication issues. In his spare time, Damon enjoys playing music with friends, making films, and cooking.
Kate Dunsmore is a doctoral candidate with a focus on political communication and international relations. Kate is interested in the role communication can play in making advances on intractable social problems such as racism and economic disparity. Her dissertation research examines the Canada-US relationship as an instance of enduring alliance. She is analyzing public diplomatic discourse and related media coverage to understand the role of discourse in this alliance and in international alliances more generally. She has also applied discourse analysis to enhancing understanding of teaching and learning. Her M.A. thesis, analyzing the discourse of African-American high school students regarding career and education aspirations, supported specific, community-centered approaches to career counseling.
Louisa Edgerly received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Cornell, rowed competitively for three years after college, worked as a professional pastry chef and lived for two years in Turkey. Her research interests include language use in the media, migration and refugee movements and the discourse of citizenship. Her master's thesis examined the use of the word "refugee" in media coverage of Hurricane Katrina, and she hopes to pursue further discourse studies as a doctoral student. When not reading and studying she competes in long-distance rowing events and tries to get out and see the rest of the Northwest.
Brittany Fiore-Silfvast enters the Ph.D. program at UW in fall 2008 to pursue questions about the cultural and societal impact of the integration of new technologies. She earned her master's degree in socio-cultural anthropology from Columbia University. Her master’s work concentrated on the ways in which new information and communication technologies are transforming warfare. Her thesis focused specifically on YouTube as a virtual battlefield for the information, images, and networks of the Iraq War. More generally, she is fascinated by the circulation of information — how and why things move and make meaning in the context of the web and the onset of user-generated media landscapes. In addition to these research interests she has also assisted research on web memorializing after the Virginia Tech shootings, worked for three years at the Kaiser Family Foundation developing their international health journalism program, and volunteered as an ethnographer in the BriBri indigenous community in Central America.
Phyllis Fletcher is an M.C. student, and a reporter for KUOW Public Radio in Seattle — a member station of National Public Radio and a service of UW. Phyllis has enjoyed her Communication Department studies in Journalism and Literature and the Sociology of News, and plans to also study Black history of the Northwest and photography as she pursues her M.C. Phyllis holds a bachelor's degree from Columbia University and a certificate in Java programming from UW. She teaches radio production with the National Association of Black Journalists and NPR's Next Generation Radio, and has guest-taught at UW, Western Washington University, the Art Institute of Seattle, Seattle Central Community College, and several high schools in King County. Phyllis was a software engineer for five years, which one would never guess from the
rudimentary look of her website.
Deen Freelon hails from Durham, N.C., and arrived at the UW as an incoming Communication master's student in the fall of 2006. After graduating with a B.A. in psychology (with honors) from Stanford University in 2002, he worked for four years as a technology trainer/web designer/multimedia consultant for Duke University's academic community. His two main areas of interest are American political rhetoric (how talking points and a loaded lexicon stack the conversational deck against unsuspecting interlocutors) and political communication on the Internet (how blogs, newspaper web sites, and collaborative web applications are changing the way people receive, interpret, and generate political messages). He has maintained a blog on his research interests continuously since June 2005, and also contributes to the group blog Blackademics. His online writing has been recognized by parties as diverse as NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen and syndicated radio-show host Neil Boortz. Deen is also adept in a number of programming and design languages, including HTML, CSS, PHP, Actionscript, Wordpress, and Linux command-line scripting.
Chris Gamble is from Colorado and received his master's in social psychology from Penn State in 2007. Broadly, he is interested in examining human-nature relations across groups and societies and how such relationships affect what comes to be perceived as natural, inevitable, and irreversible, as well as the corporate media’s role in this process. He is also interested in critically examining the history of the dominant Western notion of humanness and in the many striking parallels and connections between forms of human prejudice (such as sexism, racism, and homophobia) and speciesism and naturism. Finally, he is also interested in environmental issues such as climate change and emerging environmental movements, particularly the most radical ones, and in media representations of these.
Irina Gendelman is currently studying physical public space as an arena of communication. She is interested in the messages that are presented and contested around us on a daily basis in spaces such as the streets. She believes that by exploring the way such places are constructed and governed, the field of communication can gain valuable knowledge into relationships of power and the politics of representation. Irina lived in the former Soviet Union before immigrating to the United States. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature specializing in Russian and French from the University of Michigan and Sorbonne University of Paris. During her first two years at the UW, Irina got her feet wet in ethnographic research. She completed her M.A. thesis on communication in public spaces by studying graffiti in Olympia, WA. Her experiences and interests have led her to explore how aesthetic and commercial management of public places reflect public attitudes toward of such places. As a Ph.D. student, she plans to expand her research to a cross-cultural comparative analysis of public space as a medium of communication.
Valerie Gilbert became interested in visual culture and visual communication while studying under the University of Washington’s Photography program. She graduated from the Photography program with a B.F.A. in 2000. As an undergraduate, she was influenced by artists who addressed race and gender in their work. Film studies classes also influenced her, and she began to investigate race, gender and identity in film and popular culture. Her B.F.A. senior thesis “Still Showing,” an installment of mock movie posters, mock poster-size movie reviews, popcorn machine and confection stand, is a satirical commentary on African-Americans in Hollywood. As an M. A. student in the Department of Communication, she plans to examine how notions of race, class, gender and identity are communicated through the mulatto character in film. Valerie is an American, born in the West Indies, reared in Canada. She has written articles for Where Seattle and the World Tribune; and her artwork has been displayed in exhibits at the Seattle Art Museum, the Seattle Center, and the SGI-USA Seattle Culture Center.
Jason Gilmore joins the UW Communication Ph.D. program after graduating with an M.S.S. in international studies from the University of Colorado at Denver in 2007 where he focused on national images and international relations. His thesis, Hearts and Minds: An Analysis of Mexico’s Cultivated International Image for Promotion in the United States, used the case of Mexico to discover how countries employ tools such as targeted international public relations campaigns, cultural exchange, international sporting events, diplomacy and even foreign policy to shape their images abroad. Jason also has a B.A. in international affairs from the University of Colorado (1999) with a focus on U.S./Mexico and U.S./Latin American relations. He leaves his job as News Editor for La Voz newspaper in Denver to join the UW program. Jason is fluent in Spanish and spent most of his childhood and teenage years in Guadalajara, Mexico. He also enjoys writing fiction in both Spanish and English. His short novel, La vuelta de la esperanza: un relato de la ciudad de oro, was published in Mexico by Ediciones La Rana in 2006.
Kristin Gustafson is a doctoral candidate interested in media history, alternative and ethnic media, political communication, and social movements and organizations. In 2008, she received a Huckabay Teaching Fellowship to develop a department course on alternative and independent U.S. media. Before moving to Seattle, she received her M.A. from the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication where she examined intersections of media history, marginalization, and collective memory. Her research and teaching interests emerged from many years of working in mainstream and alternative media in Minnesota.
Katherine Hall is a Ph.D. candidate whose interests in political communication and environmental health are leading her toward a dissertation on the role of communication in environmental rule-making. She is a part-time student and is managing editor of the journal Northwest Public Health. In a previous life she was a newspaper reporter and copy editor.
Chris Harihar (B.A., Communication, University of Massachusetts Amherst) is currently an M.A. student in the Department of Communication and will be acting as a research assistant in the fall. His main areas of communicative study include interpersonal and intercultural communication, while focusing on gendered communication issues as well. His ultimate goal is to attain a Ph.D.
John Harris believes his greatest asset as a Ph.D. student is his variety of experiences. Now in his second year as a visiting professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, John has written for magazines, researched nonfiction books and worked as a reporter, photographer and editor for metro and community newspapers. What he feels he needs now is a foundation in theory and methodology. John initially saw himself writing his dissertation on trauma reporting - he would like to research the impact of media coverage on victims and their families, and on reporters. However, a keen interest in the First Amendment was recently sparked and he may want to further pursue that area of study. He is intrigued by the concept of a socially responsible press as expressed by the Hutchins Commission and he wants to learn more. He spent the spring break teaching photojournalism to reporters in Albania and that may also be an avenue of focus.
Tabitha Hart is interested in intercultural communication, the transfer of cultural products across national boundaries, globalization, call centers, and the ways in which the creation, perception, and use of internet-based technologies are mediated by culture. She has a B.A. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego and an M.A. in Communication Studies from California State University, Sacramento. Her master's thesis examined the transfer of Starbucks' customer service practices to its cafes in Berlin, Germany, and their reception by the baristas there. In between her stints of studying she spent a number of years working as an ESL instructor in Japan, the Czech Republic, and Germany.
Jessica Harvey is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication. She received her B.A. in Public Relations from Purdue University and her master's degree from Arizona State University West in Communication. Jessica's research interests focus on the intersection of family communication, media effects, and adolescence. Much of her research and community work relate to media literacy and, more specifically, parent-child talk about the media.
Andrea Hickerson comes to the program after receiving an M.A. in journalism and an M.A. in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Texas in Austin. In 2002, Andrea was the recipient of a Federal Language Area Studies fellowship in Arabic, which she has studied for three years. Andrea’s prior research has focused on Kurdish media and how the Kurds use new media to construct an identity in spite of the many physical barriers in and around Kurdistan. Andrea is interested in pursuing further research on diasporic media or the diversity of opinion in the Muslim press. Her work on President Bush and the use of religion as a marketing tool was published in British Journalism Review. In her free time Andrea enjoys long-distance running and traveling.
Julie Homchick (M.A., Humanities, Arizona State University, 2005; B.A., English, University of Washington 2002) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication and serves as Lead TA for the 2008-2009 school year. She is generally interested in how public audiences understand scientific information, and her dissertation research focuses on how different groups understand and interpret arguments for and against evolutionary theory in the museum context. Working with theories and methods from rhetorical studies, science studies and history and philosophy of science, she values interdisciplinary work to a great degree and has been able to cultivate this value through the Simpson Center for Humanities. There, she is a fellow with the Science Studies Network, has served as a graduate mentor in the Teachers as Scholars session on "Understanding Evolution," and was a fellow in the Institute on Public Humanities.
Patti Jean Hooper has taught community-based public relations at a variety of colleges and universities for the past 14 years. The 1997 flooding and evacuation of her home town enabled her to see how a government responds to its citizens; how non-profit organizations can be pulverized through the loss of their volunteer base; how community members were portrayed as victims by the press and how race, class and gender were issues throughout it all. The experience was the impetus for a new career track - Community Relations Field Officer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In earning her Ph.D., Patti Jean intends to study crisis, gender, Native American issues and how victims are portrayed in the media.
Mark Hungerford, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate, graduated with an M.A. in journalism and Middle Eastern studies from the University of Texas in Austin and a B.A. in political science from Emory University. His research areas include political communication, public opinion, media studies and rhetoric, and he is primarily interested in the construction of national identity in mediated and political discourse. Prior to his return to grad school, he taught English in Turkey for four years, and he enjoys travel and the outdoors.
Muzammil Hussain received his B.S. in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin. His research interests lie at the intersection of political communication, and communication technology and society, especially in relation to (1) new forms of political engagement and participation facilitated by advances in digital media use, and (2) citizens' evolving relationships and interactions with civic information systems, especially news and journalism.
