Mehitabel Glenhaber

Mehitabel's Bio:

I'm a freshman at MIT in Comparative Media Studies (read: how different media for conveying information affects the way that people choose and organize that information, and the way that media technologies change the way information gets shared) and Science, Technology and Society. I am a self-published comic artist, and love just about anything comics related, be it creating them or analyzing them; I've done a lot of work on comics as well, ranging from analysis of the way women choose to depict themselves in autobiographical comics to the history of that time that the US government became convinced in the 1950s that comics were turning their children into juvenile delinquents and decided to censor them, including a research paper in comic book form! I like weird intellectual history, especially topics that combine the effects of technology (especially media technology) on philosophy, the way that new technologies are incorporated into existing philosophies and fiction. In general, I'm a huge fan of periods in history with a really distinct zeitgeist where you can connect absolutely everything that's happening through some sort of underlying pattern or idea. Some particular favorites include the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the European 1920s. (Ask me about Bertrand Russell, tragic antihero of mathematics!) History of science fiction and fan cultures is another favorite historical topic of mine, everything from studying depictions of rockets in utopian 1890s sci-fi to actually doing fieldwork at Boston science fiction and fantasy conventions. Finally, I've taken a bunch of classes and done some lab work in (especially behavioral) neuroscience, including a summer studying how worms smell. (That is, how c. elegans detect odors, not what odors c. elegans produce) I spend a lot of time thinking about the way that cognitive science principles affect the way we understand art, especially comics. I've been spending a lot of time this semester studying narrative theory, the media studies/cognitive science theory of how humans process stories, for instance. I spend a lot of my free time reading science fiction, playing tabletop games and LARPs, watching German Expressionist film, swing dancing, and having too many feelings about artificial intelligence.

Getting into projects, I would absolutely love to work with students on any sort of research project related to the topics above, or practically any social sciences topic, whether you want to write a paper, put together a presentation or documentary, create some sort of artistic project, or anything else of your choosing! I would also love to help mentor students who want to create some sort of work of art be it a comic, a novel, a film or anything else.