Welcoming Hannah Zeavin as BCNM's New Director

We are pleased to announce that Hannah Zeavin, Associate Professor of History and of the Berkeley Center for New Media, will serve as the next Director of BCNM. She will bring a rich scholarly background in the history of media and technology, feminist science and technology studies, and media theory to bear on her new leadership role.

Zeavin's work centers on the history of the human sciences — psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry — in dialogue with the history of technology and media. She is the author of the award-winning books The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (2021, MIT Press) and Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the 20th Century (MIT Press, 2025), and is currently completing a third book, All Freud's Children: A Story of Inheritance (Penguin Press / Fern Press), supported by a 2022 Works in Progress Grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a 2024 Whiting Foundation Non-Fiction Grant, and a 2026 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2021, she co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and serves as Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a magazine for psychoanalysis on the left, alongside editorial roles with Psychoanalysis & History, the Psychoanalytic Acts Book Series, Television and New Media, and Palgrave's Studies in the Psychosocial series. Her academic writing has appeared in differences: A Journal of Feminist Studies, Technology and Culture, American Imago, Media, Culture & Society, and The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, with essays and criticism in Bookforum, Harper's Magazine, n+1, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, among others. She received her B.A. from Yale University in 2012 and her Ph.D. from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU in 2018.

Zeavin steps into the role following Tom McEnaney's three years as Director. During his tenure, McEnaney recruited three new FTE-holding faculty — Emma Fraser (Geography), Alex Saum-Pascual (Spanish & Portuguese), and Nicole Starosielski (Film & Media) — and led the hire of new Associate Director Aaron Fai in November 2025, following the departure of former Associate Director Lara Wolfe. He led initiatives that grew the Center's revenue by more than 1,000%, expanding support for undergraduate and graduate research funding, conference travel, student-faculty research collaborations, faculty fellowships, and BCNM's event programming. Under his directorship, the Center hosted Pulitzer Prize winner Raven Chacon, National Book Award winner Valeria Luiselli, and BCNM alum Trevor Paglen, among more than a dozen other artists, designers, historians, and theorists of new media, and organized programming under themes including "New Media Oceans," "Oakland New Media," and "Latinx and Latin American New Media." Carrying forward Gail de Kosnik's Indigenous Technologies series, McEnaney and BCNM staff — including Events & Communications Manager Raphael Cohen and graduate student coordinators Sierra Ed, Jesús Nazario, and Sophia Perez — brought indigenous scholars, artists, and activists to campus, culminating in the weeklong "Native Seas" series in Spring 2026, which welcomed traditional navigators from Micronesia for events at the California Academy of Sciences' Morrison Planetarium, Waterside Workshops, and the Eugene Jarvis Auditorium at UC Berkeley. He also expanded BCNM's reach beyond campus through the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme with Oxford University, a faculty research exchange with the University of Antwerp's Arts and Media Archaeology team, and the Center's first Community Engagement grant, awarded to faculty Emma Fraser and Greg Niemeyer for a project with the water justice group We the People of Detroit. He also hosted the Center's 20th anniversary alumni conference.

Thank you to Tom McEnaney for his exceptional leadership over the past three years, and congratulations to Hannah Zeavin on her new leadership position at BCNM.