People

Sreela Sarkar is Associate Professor of Communication and Affiliate Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at SCU. Prior to academia, she worked as a documentary filmmaker and an investigative television journalist. Her work focuses on an engagement with digital tools and research and a humanistic approach to the digital. Her archival and ethnographic research critically examines modernization processes in global, urban contexts with a focus on the role of mass media and communication technologies. Her work in India has centered on how working-class youth in urban peripheries in Delhi interface with digital “skills training” initiatives, with a focus on aspiration, mobility, and structural inequities in rapidly globalizing India. Her current research examines the visual politics of urbanscapes in Silicon Valley to investigate economic and social inequalities that are shaped by complex issues of immigration, race, and gender. Her engagement with digital archives on colonial history in both the India and US contexts focuses on rethinking the constitution of these archives and vital absences and deletions. Her published work integrates transdisciplinary perspectives and has been published in leading Communication, Feminist, and STS journals; edited collections; and featured in popular media and podcasts.

Amy Lueck is an Assistant Professor of English. She teaches and researches writing and rhetoric, particularly focusing on the material and rhetorical histories of schooling, gendered spaces/places, and public memory.

Michelle Burnham writes and teaches on early American literature, Native American literature, transoceanic studies, and critical theory. She is especially interested in using digital tools and methods to recover and understand forgotten or neglected texts and writers, including the creation of digital editions and maps of these works.

Lee Panich is an Associate Professor of Anthropology. His research employs a combination of archaeological, ethnographic, and archival data to examine the long-term histories of the indigenous societies of western North America and their interactions with Euroamerican colonial institutions. He is particularly interested in how the complex histories of the California missions are presented to general audiences.

Kirstyn Leuner is an Assistant Professor of English specializing in 18th-century British Literature and Digital Humanities. She is Director and Co-Editor of The Stainforth Library of Women's Writing, a DH project that recovers and studies the largest private library of Anglophone women’s writing collected in the nineteenth century. 

Bruno Ruviaro is a composer and electronic musician interested in laptop orchestras, live-electronics, acousmatic music, sampling & musical borrowing; theater, dance, linguistics, speech, radio art, linux, intellectual (im)property, music & politics.

Jeffrey Bracco teaches and in Directing, Dramaturgy, Critical Perspectives In Performance, Spectacle and Society, Shakespeare in Film, Theatre East/West and Introduction to Performance Collaboration. After being part of the Faculty Learning Community studying VR and AR, he began working with other faculty, staff and students on a project that uses AR to enhance audience engagement in live theatre productions. 

Heather Noel Turner is an Assistant Professor and Director of Internships in the Department of English at Santa Clara University (SCU). At SCU, she serves as founder and director of the User-Experience (UX) Research and Writing Lab and as a member of the Digital Humanities Working Group Advisory Council.