Graduate Student Profiles (K-R)

Yeo Jung Kim (a.k.a. Nicole) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication. She earned her MA degree from the Department of Communication at the University of Washington and her BA degree in Communications from George Mason University. Her research interest reaches across the fields of journalism, intercultural communication, and international relations. In her MA thesis, she explored the area of journalistic patterns of constructing international news through the phenomenon of "international media echo." Her current research focuses on the issue of international migration and labor. In her spare time, she enjoys watching foreign films, yoga, and spending time with family and friends.

Katie Knobloch, a doctoral student, earned her MMC and BA from the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University where she specialized in citizenship and civic communication. Her master's thesis explores how college students form their understandings of democratic citizenship and how these understandings impact their performance as citizens. In her doctoral work, Katie hopes to continue to study the public sphere's role in shaping the actions of citizens, paying particular attention to how education and the media influence civic identities.

Monique Lacoste is working toward her PhD after earning her master's degree from the Communication Department at the University of Washington and her BA from Sarah Lawrence College. In her MA thesis, Monique examined how identity and meaning were constructed in the discourse of a gang rape trial which occurred in her native Orange County, CA. Her research interests include cultural studies, critical and feminist theory and the politics of representation. She is particularly interested in examining how media representations of sexuality and violence structure, exploit and impact cultural ideologies of race, class, gender and space. After living most of her life in the arid landscape of Southern California, Monique has made it her mission to move to increasingly colder and colder climates. She hopes to one day end up in Scotland, but would probably settle for any cool place with lots of trees and water. In her quasi-free time, Monique enjoys consuming television teen dramas, getting angry at the news, reading genre fiction, making stuff and taking stuff apart, listening to good music, watching documentaries and anime, playing with her cat and dreaming about her future as an international jewel thief.

Mark LaPointe's work focuses on examining points of synthesis among popular media, identity and political engagement. Mark earned his MA in journalism from the University of Nevada and his BA in English (minors in Women's Studies and African American Studies) from Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Mark is currently working on several projects including a historical study of The Northwest Enterprise (Seattle's now defunct African American newspaper), examinations of queer theory and pop culture, and a study of televisual presentations and subsequent reception of a "marriage paradigm". He has presented papers at ICA, The National Newspaper Association, and the American Political Science Association. In his spare time, Mark enjoys biking, reading and (soon) working on his newly acquired 1900 Victorian house with his partner of 7 years, Jim.

Colin Lingle is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication. His areas of interest include political blogging, the dynamics of independent and corporate media, climate change communication and film. During his career as a media professional in San Francisco, Seattle and New York City, he worked as a copywriter, freelance writer, editor and Web producer. He completed his MA at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where his thesis examined aspects of online political discourse surrounding ABC’s controversial docudrama “The Path to 9/11.” As a graduate student, he taught basic interactive journalism principles to undergraduates and helped guide the transition of CU’s student paper from print to the Web. He received a BA in American Studies from Yale University.

Li Liu joins the PhD program at the University of Washington after earning her master’s degree in Mass Communication at Peking University in Beijing, China. She has worked at several Chinese newspapers as business reporter, including China Daily, the only national English daily in China. Before graduation from Peking University, she interned with several media, including CNN and Bertelsmann. She also helped to establish one of China’s first English campus news websites, PKU news. She is interested in transnational media companies’ practice in China market. Her master’s thesis proposed to analyze China’s media developing environment with PEST model, which combined political, economical, cultural and technological factors together. At the University of Washington, she will consider the media environment of transnational corporations in China, including their local PR strategy and government relationship management. She also looks forward to exploring the relationship between civic engagement and citizenry in China under the globalization, including looking at how global media interacts with local audience, relative governmental policy analysis and the impact of on-line communication on China’s citizenry, especially through the introduction of on-line blogger communities. As someone who loves hiking and coffee, Li Liu enjoys her stay in Seattle very much, especially during summer time. She spends her spare time hiking around the Puget Sound area.

Sarah McCaffrey graduated from Colorado College in 2005 with a degree in Comparative Literature. While at Colorado College, Sarah competed in varsity cross country and track, wrote for the Opinions & Editorials section of the school’s newspaper, The Catalyst, and served as co-captain for the women’s ultimate Frisbee team. Her undergraduate thesis, The ‘Dis-ease’ of Bilingualism in the United States and Possible Remedies, explores the ways in which the Spanish and English languages interact in U.S. culture and examines how language controls, creates, and reflects both individual and cultural identities.

After graduating, Sarah worked for a year as one of the Colorado College Writing Center’s professional writing consultants. Each writer with whom Sarah worked, even when haunted by writer’s block, sleep-deprived, or overwhelmed by the writing process, reminded her of the importance of the art of creation and of her own aspiration to become a student again. Since graduation, Sarah has also worked as a legal clerk and a landscaper, driven across the country, spent time road biking in Utah, and qualified for the Boston Marathon.

Lindsey Meeks is a Texas transplant with a BS in Political Communication and a minor in Technology, Literacy, and Culture from The University of Texas at Austin (Hook'em Horns!). Her research interests include evaluating the impact of the Internet and its interactive features on the relationship between youth, voting-age young adults, and politics at the national, state, and local level. While her primary focus will be on civic engagement in the U.S. she would like to eventually extend her research internationally. In her spare time you can find Lindsey at the movies, on the trail on her bike, cooking, or hanging out around town at one of the many local festivals.

Jamie Moshin, an incoming PhD student, focuses on the rhetoric of culture and identity. His primary area of focus is on the representation of Jewish identity, but generally concentrates on racial/ethnic stereotyping, humor as power, and filmic representations. Jamie received his MA in Communication Arts and Sciences from The Pennsylvania State University in 2006, where he wrote a Master's Thesis entitled "Laughter at what Cost?: An Analysis of Jewish Identity in Humorous Films about the Holocaust," and he hopes that he has the intestinal fortitude to turn it into a book. He also hopes to stop studying the Holocaust because, really, it's just too depressing. Jamie no longer remembers exactly what "spare time" means, but he vaguely remembers enjoying reading, attending concerts, cooking, skiing, playing poker, and watching sports. And, of course, pina coladas and long walks on the beach in a gently misting rain.

Kristine Mroczek joins the MA program interested in communication and culture, international (or global) communication, identity and discourse analysis. She recently completed her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Washington after working several years in event planning and public relations in Hawai’i. Her BA honors thesis was titled “Discourse of Luxury: The Creation and Promotion of an Elite Class Through Symbolic Capital in the Luxury Hotel Industry.” Kristine has always practiced some form of art, from photography to painting, and is intrigued with how it adds another dimension to the study of visual communication. Her time in Hawai’i plays a significant role in driving her focus in learning and comprehending how everyday language and communication creates power relations, ingrouping / outgrouping, othering and how it forms one’s identity. She would like to explore how aspects of culture are presented through studying discourse. In Kristine’s “ideal” leisure time, she enjoys cooking gluten-free and drinking wine with her husband and friends, making jewelry, reading intelligent novels, and any water activity; however, in reality lately, there has only been enough “free time” for the wine.

Madhavi Murty joins the PhD program at UW, having completed her master's in mass communication from the University of Minnesota. She arrived in cold Minneapolis straight from the monsoons in Bombay, India in 2003. She worked as a journalist in Bombay for four years before plunging into academics. Her research interests though take her back to her experiences as a journalist as well as life as a member of a burgeoning middle class in a country with superpower aspirations. For her master's thesis, she examined the shifts in frames of the nation and religion in popular Indian film when the Hindu Nationalist movement had gained political legitimacy in the country. Her current interests focus on the media's role in the construction of difference, both social and political. In this context, she would like to examine race in America and continue to research religion in India and how they are tied to nationalism within popular media discourse. When she is not discussing school with her husband, she enjoys watching sports and films with him.

Timothy Pasch (M.A., University of Hawaii; B.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Diplôme, Université Paul Valéry III) is researching circumpolar (arctic) electronic communication. Timothy is a fluent French and Japanese speaker and a FLAS recipient for Inuktitut. His paper: Arctic Cyberspace: Internet as Freedom, was presented at the technology conference at UC Berkeley and will be published this year. Timothy is an electronic music producer and composer and is creating original audio and flash content for the web portal related to his dissertation. Timothy is PADI Instructor #469292.

Pamela Pietrucci is a first-year PhD student. She is an alumna of the University of L'Aquila where she obtained her Laurea Triennale degree in 2005 in Science of Communication and also her Laurea Specialistica Degree in Theory of Communication in the summer of 2007. Her graduation thesis was entitled "Democracy and Liberty from Tocqueville to Lippmann. From the Tyranny of the Majority to Public Opinion Critique." Just after her last graduation she started working as a researcher in the Italian Institute of Historical Studies "B.Croce" in Naples. Her main interests regard the relations between mass media and democratic theories and processes, the role of public opinion in democracies and various forms of peculiar public opinion phenomena such as cultural and political Anti-Americanism in the Old World. Pamela is also interested in the relations between Europe and the United States and in the cultural and political contrasts between the two.

Michele Poff enters our doctoral program driven to improve humans’ relationship with nature. She feels that scientists have the necessary information, but that the importance of protecting our resources is not reaching the business world or the public. Thus, we humans are causing our own demise through devastating our planet. Michele wishes to research the effective transfer of information from those who know to those who need to know. In that endeavor, she intends to build upon her cross-cultural awareness gleaned from teaching in Germany and Italy and international students at home, as well as her studies of law and work with various professionals. She earned her BA in English from U.C. Berkeley and her MA:TESOL in the Applied Linguistics department at Portland State University. Michele’s thesis was a study of wetland science rhetoric.

Justin Reedy is hoping to combine his interest in science, politics, and communication in the doctoral program. He had sworn off graduate school after earning his bachelor's degree in earth and atmospheric sciences from the Georgia Institute of Technology, but later went back on that vow to come to the UW Department of Communication. After graduating from Georgia Tech in 2000, he had a short stint as a behind-the-scenes meteorologist for a TV network. He then returned to journalism, a field in which he had worked while finishing his undergraduate degree. His background in earth sciences and his interest in social and political issues has led him to the UW Department of Communication, where he is studying political communication, new digital media, group communication, and the intersection of science and politics. Justin is a science writer for the UW School of Medicine News and Community Relations office, where he works on media relations and publications.