Scholarship

What makes a world?

This is the question that guides my work as a critic and theorist. Accordingly, I take a comparative approach to the fictional and virtual worlds of literature, film, and video games, by mobilizing media theory, literary theory, and critical theory—especially poststructuralism and science and technology studies—to explore the philosophical affordances of digital aesthetics and technologies alongside the political bounds of our mediated society.

Across my work, I explore the virtual spaces of video games to understand how their essentially textual grounding in code and circuitry produces a dazzling array of phenomenal worlds, constrained, like our ordinary experience, by language itself; I anatomize the complex layerings of fictionality that define postmodern experiments in form and narrative, from Nabokov to Nintendo, Ada to Zelda; I connect and compare disparate traditions, histories, and genres to reveal the indivisibility of so-called “old” and “new” media, creating new pathways for conversation and critique; and I uncover the technological, social, and ideological apparatuses that animate media forms, attending especially to works that self-consciously confront them.

Right now, I’m working on a monograph about how the virtual worlds of video games manifest in and as language. I’m also undertaking preliminary work on the linguistic and ecological implications of artificial intelligence and on American Gothic reckonings with petrocapitalism across independent and major studio video games in the last 15 years.

I hold a Ph.D. and an M.S. in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where I also earned a certification in Science and Technology Studies, and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I also completed a minor and a thesis in Creative Writing.

Monographs

(In Progress) Imagined Fortresses: Video Games as Language. Complete manuscript.

Journal Articles

(In Press) “Video Games Need a Theory of Language.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

(2022) “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Gods: Reading Night in the Woods through Mark Fisher.” Game Studies. Volume 22, Issue 1. (Link.)

Conference Papers

(2024) “Infiltrating Big Shell: Oil, AI, and ‘Petrogrammatology’ in Metal Gear Solid 2.” Game Studies Panel: Oil and Water. 37th Annual Conference of Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) in Dallas, TX.

(2024) “Lasciate Autonomia: On Imaginary Possibilities.” Panel: Theorizing the Narrative Situation. Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) in Montreal, Quebec.

(2023) “Observer Effects: Meaning at the End of the Universe in Outer Wilds.” Game Studies Panel: Diverse Play. 36th Annual Conference of Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) in Tempe, Arizona.

(2020) “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild through the Lens of Italo Calvino's Memo on ‘Lightness.’” Proceedings of the 2020 Digital Games Research Association International Conference. Extended Abstract. (Link.)

(2019) Sherman, Jihan, Takeria Blunt, and Patrick Fiorilli. “Telling the Bees: Designing for Immersion, Mediation, and Ritual.” Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction. Work-In-Progress Paper. (Link.)

Selected Talks

(2025) “The Video Game as Writing: On Language, Literature, and Lightness.” University of Texas at Arlington, Department of English. Invited Talk.

(2025) “The Video Game as Writing: On Language, Literature, and Lightness.” University of Georgia, Department of English. Invited Talk.

(2022) Panel Moderator. Feeling Extra. Backward Glances Graduate Student Conference. Northwestern University, Department of Radio/Television/Film.

(2022) “You Are Standing in an Open Field: Video Games as Language.” Digital Media Talks Series. The Georgia Institute of Technology, Digital Media Program.