Abigail De Kosnik

Abigail De Kosnik is an Associate Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) and the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS), and an affiliated faculty member of Gender & Women’s Studies, Film & Media, and Folklore. She researches histories and theories of new media, film and television, social media, fan studies, piracy studies, cultural memory, and archive studies. She is particularly interested in how issues of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and transnationalism intersect with new media studies and performance studies.

De Kosnik’s book Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom was published by MIT Press in 2016. She is the co-editor (with Keith Feldman) of the essay collection #identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (University of Michigan Press, 2019), and the co-editor, with Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington, of the edited essay collection “The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era” (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). She has published articles on media fandom, popular digital culture, and performance studies in Third Text, JCMS (Journal of Cinema and Media Studies), The International Journal of Communication, Modern Drama, Transformative Works and Cultures, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Performance Research, and elsewhere. She is the 2020-2025 craigslist Distinguished Chair in New Media. She has won four awards for teaching, advising, and mentoring at UC Berkeley, including the campus’s highest honor for instruction, the Distinguished Teaching Award. She is the Principal Investigator of the Media Education Research Lab (MERL), which evaluates and reviews diverse representation in films and television series, and measures and maps online media piracy.

De Kosnik is currently writing a book on media piracy in the U.S. by queer and BIPOC users tentatively titled Minority Piracy. She is faculty co-organizer of The Color of New Media, a working group that focuses on the overlap of critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and transnational studies with new media studies (sponsored by the Center for Race and Gender with additional support from BCNM). De Kosnik is Filipina American.

Education: Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies (home department: Radio/Television/Film), Northwestern University; B.A. in Modern Thought and Literature and M.A. in Humanities/English Literature, Stanford University