Teaching
Connecting digital media and games to real-world issues, philosophical concepts, and global literatures.
How does a video game avatar relate to a novel’s first-person narrator, or a film’s subjective camerawork? How does a narrative adventure game like Kentucky Route Zero build upon the Southern Gothic themes of Flannery O’Connor or the magical realist imagery of Gabriel García Márquez? What can Augustine illuminate about internet infrastructure, or Proust clarify about quantum physics? And how can we design the negotiation between a game’s constraints and its players’ intentions? These are the kinds of questions my students and I investigate across my seminar and design classes.
I am equipped to teach classes on media, literature, critical theory, and design—alongside advanced courses on topics like poststructuralism, postmodernism, video game theory and criticism, phenomenology, deconstruction, speculative and science fiction, queer theory, ecocriticism, and science and technology studies.
The overarching principle of my teaching practice is to encourage respect for and attention to complexity, contradiction, and interconnection—acceptance of the fact that what first appears simple becomes, through questioning, marvelously strange. Across my courses, I emphasize: writing and communication, open-ended and student-led discussion, multimedia and interdisciplinarity, primary texts in original contexts, and thoughtful and responsible uses of technology in the classroom.
Courses
(Spring 2024, Winter 2025, Spring 2026) Video Games and Language at University of Chicago
(Spring 2024) American Gothic Video Games at Northwestern University
(Fall 2022, Spring 2024) Video Games and Temporality at Northwestern University
(Winter 2024) Avatars and Player-Characters at Northwestern University
(Winter 2023, 2024) Video Game Theory and Criticism at Northwestern University
(Spring 2021) Intro to Media Studies at Georgia Tech
(Fall 2020) Intro to Game Studies at Georgia Tech
(Summer 2020, 2021) Computing and Society at Georgia Tech (TA)
(Spring 2020) Principles of Interaction Design at Georgia Tech (TA)
(Spring 2019) Game Design Studio at Georgia Tech (TA)
