Andrea Acosta
Assistant Professor of Media Studies
With Pitzer Since: 2023
Field Group: Media Studies
Campus Address: Fletcher 220
Email: [email protected]
Office Hours: See Faculty Directory
Education
Ph.D, University of California, Los Angeles
BA, Stanford University
Recent Courses
- Introduction to Digital Media (MS 051)
- Digital Storytelling (MS 055)
Research Interests
Andrea Acosta is a digital media and critical race scholar with training in literature and media studies. Her teaching combines digital media studies and theory with her training in literary analysis to ask questions about race, inequality, and power in the digital era. Acosta’s research focus is South Korean popular culture, most notably K-pop and its related media, through which she primarily explores minoritarian and global/transcultural fan communities online. Her approach to South Korean popular culture positions it not as a niche interest or area of study but as one broadly relevant to the study of digital media at large: its global flows, its political potential (particularly for people of color), and its distributions of power. Acosta also has a sustained research interest in exploring cultural fictions surrounding algorithmic technology – bots, machine learning, and “AI” technology – to uncover the myriad ways these fictions sustain and produce narratives of race and (in)humanity today.
Selected Publications
“Bots and Binaries: On the Failure of Human Verification,” The Hallyu Project, Post45 Contemporaries Series, 2023
“#BlackOutBTS: Race and Self(ie) Display in Digital Fandom,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS), 2023
Selected Conference Presentations:
Chair/Organizer and Presenter, “WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD: ASMR, Digital Intimacy, and the Internet Body,” Seminar, Association for the Arts of the Present Annual Conference (ASAP/13), UCLA, September 2022.
“Verify You Are Human: On Bots and Minoritarian Being in Digital K-pop Fandom,” Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Annual Conference, online, April 2022.
“Black Digital (Dis)play,” Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Annual Conference, Denver, CO, April 2021.
