People

Dr. Kurt Fendt is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS/W) and Director of MIT’s Active Archives Initiative. He teaches Digital Humanities subjects in CMS/W and German Studies courses in Global Studies and Languages.

Ben Silverman is a second-year graduate student in the Comparative Media Studies Master of Science program. His research primarily concerns participatory archives, fandom, affect, and queer online communities. At the Active Archives Initiative, Ben acts as a research assistant, co-developing the Annotation Studio software, running the Active Archives newsletter, and continuing exploratory research in digital archives. Ben also studied computer music at Brown University and makes techno music in his spare time.

Anna Ivanov is a second-year graduate student in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She received her B.A. in Russian, Linguistics, and Data Science at Macalester College in 2018. Her academic interests include 20th century poetry, the digital humanities, Russian women’s writing, the city of Moscow, and Russian children’s literature. She is particularly interested in the role of poetry in the public sphere as it expands to include new media. In her free time, she loves crosswords, podcasts, and ice skating, as well as working as a barista at Harvard’s Café Gato Rojo.

Meesh Zucker is a 2nd year Masters student in City Planning and Urban Studies at MIT. Her research explores how social identities exist and interact with the built environment, particularly in how to spatialize and map lesser-known histories of communities often found buried in the archives. She dreams of creating public spaces curated by human desire and reflective of the diverse community narratives that shape them.

A New Post

Karyn is a 2020 Nieman Fellow, she comes from a small northern First Nation called Pikwakanagan. She has worked as a journalist and videographer, documentary-maker, and prior to coming to Harvard she managed a newsroom for APTN, Canada’s Indigenous broadcaster. Preferred journalism beats are politics and human rights. She has a BA in journalism and an MA in History. Karyn is sensitive about sharing her itunes playlist, because she fears judgment over her often questionable choices.-

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Rachel is a third year MIT undergraduate studying Art and Design in the School of Architecture and Planning. She is mainly interested in user experience, user interface design, and human computer interaction. Her experience in HCI comes from interning at an HCI laboratory (KIXLAB) at KAIST, UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program) work at the d’Arbeloff Laboratory at MIT, and past coursework in both computer science and design. When she is not working, she enjoys dancing as part of MIT Asian Dance Team.

Lucy Yip is a 2nd year Masters student in Design Studies with a Technology Concentration at Harvard, with a blended background in computation, engineering, art, design and, humanities. Her interest in design focuses on the concept of “interaction” and “intersection”, especially in-between human and machine, objects and empathy. Before this summer, she was a joined research intern at Microsoft Research’s EPIC (Extended Perception, Interaction and Cognition) Group and M365IDEAs (Insights, Data Engineering and Analytics) Group working on tactile perception and data visual/physicalization projects.

Will Freudenheim is a first-year graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. His research is focused on investigating collaborative knowledge-sharing platforms, and considering new applications of locative media in the development of educational tools. Recently, he worked as a game designer and resident at NYU’s Game Center Incubator, where he co-led the development of a puzzle and exploration game called Crosshatch. At MIT, Will joins the Education Arcade, where he hopes to participate in creating games and systems to invite students to develop new understandings of their environments.

Enuma Mokel is a third-year undergraduate student studying Business Analytics in the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is particularly intersted in learning more about data visualization as a complement to her coursework. Outside of class, she serves as president of MIT’s only all-female a cappella group, the MIT Muses.