We’re thrilled to announce our newest postdoc in the Social Media Collective, based in the New England lab of Microsoft Research!

Elena Maris, University of Pennsylvania

Elena received her Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines the ways media/tech industries and audiences work to influence each other, with a focus on their technological tactics and the roles of gender and sexuality in their interactions. She also studies how identity is represented and experienced in popular culture and online. Her dissertation explored how online audience groups construct media industries and opportunities for influencing media content, a concept she called the “imagined industry.” Elena returns to MSRNE after interning with the SMC in 2017, and will continue working on the project she began then, on industries’ use of metrics to measure fandom. She is also starting a new project about the increased demand for qualitative understandings of technology, big data, metrics and analytics in the tech industries, and the gendering of such ‘soft’ data work. Elena’s work has been published in Critical Studies in Media Communication, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Feminist Media Studies.

It’s of course hard to celebrate the choice of one, when we also had to say no to so many superb candidates. We are so honored and humbled by the quality and range of scholars who want to come work with us, and offer our best wishes to those we couldn’t bring in as well.