Neta Alexander

 Neta Alexander joins the FAS as Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies. Before coming to Yale, she taught at Colgate University and served as an Assistant Editor of Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. She earned a PhD from New York University and an MA from Columbia University. Her work focuses on digital culture, film and media, science and technology studies, and critical disability studies. Her analysis of buffering revealed the understudied ways in which latency and delay are inherent to digital systems and infrastructures. Her first book, Failure (Polity, 2020), co-authored with Arjun Appadurai, reveals how Silicon Valley and Wall Street monetize failure and forgetfulness. Her second book, Interface Frictions (forthcoming, Duke University Press), explores four ubiquitous interface design features—refresh, playback speed, autoplay, and Night Shift—to develop a theory of digital debility. Taken together, these case studies demonstrate what can be gained from placing the non-average user at the center of media history. Professor Alexander’s articles have appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture, Cinema Journal, Cinergie, Film Quarterly, Media Fields Journal, and Flow Journal, among other publications. She has also contributed chapters to the anthologies The Netflix Effect (Bloomsbury, 2016), Compact Cinematics (Bloomsbury, 2017), Pandemic Media (Mason Press, 2021), Technics (University of Amsterdam, 2024), and Disability Media Studies (NYU Press, forthcoming). Her writing has been translated into German, Slovenian, French, Italian, and Portuguese.