English and Media Studies

Senior Lecturer Brian Wilson, MFA has released and is exhibiting a series of new artistic works in 2D and 3D. Wilson was also recently accepted as an Associate Member to the Boston Sculptors Gallery. With a sculptural practice that centers on the tension between form and perception, Wilson works with familiar materials—concrete, glass, wood, and steel. Through distortion, twisting, juxtaposition, and spatial disruption, he invites viewers to reconsider the assumptions they hold about the physical world and the objects in it. His recent series, Sandworks, aims to bring attention to the relationship society has with sand. Wilson’s artistic, professional, and research-based practices include 2D and 3D projects that explore ideas of perception.

Brian’s recent photo based research project Why We Make is a photo-ethnographic series that aims to foreground the motivations of creative professionals and document their work in various disciplines. Why We Make Featuring Sandworks is on view at the RSM Art Gallery from Sept.-October 7th, 2025.

Ekkarat Ruanglertsilp, EMS lecturer, teaches linguistics, first-year composition, and multimodal communication courses that focus on language variation, change, and attitudes in the American context as part of everyday social practice.

He is also specialized in socio-cultural linguistics, and language in the pop culture domain. His publications on critical discourse analysis, sexuality studies, celebrity culture, World Englishes, have appeared in journals such as Journal for Cultural Research, Manusya: Journal of Humanities, and in the New York magazine (Vulture) interview – Why You Can’t Stop Saying ‘That’s That Me, Espresso.’

Ruanglertsilp is currently working on an article manuscript which explores how U.S. gay men, who identify as fans of female vocalists, engage with the feminist ideologies in pop diva culture and the gay male stereotype of diva-worship using the critical discourse analysis frameworks. In it, he investigates the several insightful ways of how certain U.S. gay men came to their novel understandings of womanhood through the diva-worship practice while also seeking meaningful and self-empowering ways to identify with their divas and what they represent.

In 2025, EMS Associate Professor Val Wang launched The Climate Creativity Lab (CCL), a transdisciplinary collective committed to promoting artistic and creative responses to the climate crisis and imagining more just and sustainable futures. The lab develops pedagogy, research, and creative expression through journalism, writing, film, media, and more. They plan to explore topics including climate fiction, sustainability, speculative design, and the circular economy.

The lab emerged out of conversations between Wang and Natural and Applied Sciences Associate Professor Zana Cranmer about the critical need for art about the climate crisis, as the battle is, in the words of organizer adrienne marie brown, an “imagination battle,” not just one of numbers or data. Along with Wang and Cranmer, the lab now includes nearly a dozen faculty members in the English and Media Studies Department, Andrew James of the Office of Sustainability, and Danielle Krcmar of the RSM Gallery. 

Engaging students is a major focus of the CCL. In Spring 2026, Wang taught EMS 336 (Creative Writing: Climate Fiction) and guided students to use creative writing to both process climate grief and paralysis and to gain agency through imagining and writing possible futures. Along with two students, she MC’ed the “Art That Fuels Change” panel at the MassEnergize conference. 

The CCL also brings artists to campus. In the spring of 2026, EMS hosted Jamaican filmmaker Esther Figueroa for a screening of her documentary Fly Me to the Moon, a feature documentary that uses aluminum, the metal of modernity, to explore themes of technological innovation, extractivism, and environmental devastation.

Photo courtesy of MassEnergize.