About Us
Founded in 2020, Instasociety is an open-access resource led by three doctoral researchers exploring how social media is changing popular culture. They met at the inaugural Reading Instapoetry conference hosted by the University of Glasgow. From nostalgia for obsolescent media to cutting-edge digital humanities methods, they write about everything related to social media as it relates to the humanities.
Tanja Grubnic is completing her PhD at the University of Western Ontario where she studies the relationships among social media, contemporary poetry, and the face of publishing in the age of globalization. Her fields of specialization are Canadian literature and cultural studies, though she has grown particularly interested in bridging the gap between literary studies and media studies to show how Canadian instapoets circulate within the category of Canadian literature and beyond. She also maintains an interest in researching nostalgia for obsolescent media and other nostalgic aesthetics in relation to the convergence of digital media and literature. Email her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @tanjagrubnic.
Camilla Holm is finishing her PhD in library and information science at Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), Norway, where she is lectures and studies instapoetry as a cultural phenomenon from a media ecological perspective. The project also involves the use of methods from the digital humanities. At OsloMet she is part of the research group LITKULT, which deals with the dissemination of culture and literature in society. Her research interests include social media, digitization, digital literature, pop cultural phenomena, and the use of digital methods in research. Fun fact: Camilla doodles all of the issue covers herself using her Remarkable. You may reach her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter at @supercamilla.
Yasamin Rezaei is a PhD student in Cultural, Literary and Linguistic Studies at the University of Miami, Florida, the U.S, where she studies French and Italian dramatic literatures of the 20th century and teaches both languages. Exploring the intersections of language and media from a sociolinguistic point of view, her research interests include social media, pop culture, new media studies, digital performance and theatre studies, digital humanities, and the future of humans and technology interactions from a posthuman point of view.
She often writes about community and the notion of nostalgia, and also creates, explores, and theorizes Instapoetry among Iranian users of Instagram and aims to introduce it to the Persian literary community.
She obtained her BA and MA in Process Engineering from the Universities of Tehran in Iran and Bologna in Italy. You may reach her at [email protected] or @YasaminRezaei on Twitter
Magdalena Elisabeth Korecka is a PhD candidate and a research associate in the ERC project “Poetry in the Digital Age” at the Universität Hamburg. As part of sub-project 3 “Poetry and Contemporary Visual Culture,” in her dissertation project, she investigates the interrelation of visual aesthetics and sociopolitical messaging in several types of social media poetry. She previously completed the “Anglophone Literatures and Cultures” MA program with a focus on cultural and media studies, a BA in “English and American Studies” as well as a BA in “Journalism and Communication Science” at the University of Vienna. In general, her research interests include contemporary socio-political poetry on social media as well as media aesthetics and methodology. You may reach her at ma[email protected] or follow on Twitter at @m_e_korecka.