Isabella Fincher is a media and cultural studies researcher. Her research interests include gender and sexuality, critical theory, political activism, posthumanism, and speculative fiction with a focus on East Asia. She recently graduated with a master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, writing her thesis on “Cyberpunking Queer Sinofuturisms: Queering Posthuman Futures and Postsocialist Techno-Imaginaries in Chinese Baihe Cyber Literature.”

Isabella graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Journalism and BM in Music Performance from the University of Colorado Boulder. She was named the College of Media, Communication and Information’s William W. White Outstanding Graduate and the College of Music’s Outstanding Graduating Senior. Other honors and awards include the UW-Milwaukee Women’s and Gender Studies Department’s JL Jerger Fellowship, Mu Phi Epsilon Foundation’s Gerke Collegiate Award, and the Presser Foundation’s Undergraduate Scholar Award.

Her undergraduate honors thesis, “An examination of mainstream media’s treatment of female guitarists,” is published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies and featured in Guitar World, Shesaid.so, and Loud Women. She has presented her research at the PopCon/IASPM-US Joint Conference, International Conference on Gender and Sexuality, the Guitar Foundation of America Conference, and the International Communication Association Conference.

Her arts writing and criticism has been featured in the Guitar Foundation of America’s Soundboard Magazine; the CU Independent, CU Boulder’s award-winning student newspaper; and Sharps & Flatirons, a Boulder-based independent classical music blog.