Faculty and Staff Highlights

If you see a fellow tinkering away at our Media Lab server, or photographing our community, or even working to help layout this newsletter, you have likely met Jack Furtado, our new technical assistant.

Jack, a Hampshire graduate, is a videographer and 16mm Filmmaker himself, a technical whiz, was the clear choice of our hiring committee this spring to replace Jessi Shaheen, who left earlier this semester after three years in the department.

Jack has already plunged headlong into the position, taking over and improving our social media sites not to mention taking on the role as layout editor for The Front Page.

Sal Fallica has just published “Bob Dylan and Spectacle Culture: Yesterday and Today,” in Boomers and Popular Culture.

Fallica has appeared on WNYU radio discussing Dylan and the contemporary music scene, and will be presenting at the Media Ecology Association’s annual conference in June on “The Imaginary Community Depicted in the Introductions of Bob Dylan Concerts.”

Fallica will also be introducing to our communications curriculum a new course in celebrity culture scheduled for next spring.

John Drew is on a major roll. In addition to his work with Operation Splash and in initiating with Mark Grabowski our new travel abroad class to Cuba, Drew is the recipient of the International Faculty Development Award which will take him to Lima, Peru for 10 days this summer to attend a seminar in “Peruvian Food Systems: Balancing Growth and Preservation.” He hopes to develop a future study abroad course having to do with food sustainability practices and the changing nature of food distribution systems.

John also recently appeared on “Fresh Outlook” on Ebru TV. If not enough, he and Joan Stein, aided by a faculty development grant, will be producing a fictional film telling the story of a contemporary human trafficking operation based on a farm in New York’s Hudson Valley. The film is loosely inspired by a real life and recent Long Island news story.

Anna Akerman and Terrence Ross have been awarded sabbaticals for the fall to work on their respective projects. Akerman is a major researcher at Nickelodeon and is involved with looking at the relationship between media and children. Ross is continuing his Shared Roots project that connects subjects via innovative media with their ancestral roots. He will primarily be working on editing interviews with nomads from the Western Sahara, a set of interviews recorded by Adelphi alums last summer.

Professors Peter Costello and Peggy Cassidy are also moving forward on major book projects. Costello is working on a followup to his critically acclaimed book, Attachment-Based Psychotherapy: Helping Patients Develop Adaptive Capacities. Cassidy will be continuing her work on Children, Media, and American History: Printed Poison, Pernicious Stuff, and Other Terrible Temptations for Routledge Publishing.

Grabowski on Internet

Mark Grabowski will present a paper on the “Battle for Control of the Internet” at the Southern States Communications Association’s annual convention in Tampa, Florida.

Grabowski has also become our resident expert on the controversial issue of net neutrality. His article on the subject appeared in February’s Stanford Law & Policy Review.

This article appeared in the Spring 2015 edition of The Front Page, the Department of Communications newsletter.