The ECL is proud to announce that Professor Steven Gotzler and Professor Michael Gutierrez have both been awarded Global Partnership Expansion Grants!
Prof. Gotzler’s award grows out of existing partnerships with faculty at King’s College London (KCL) who have been collaborating with the Critical Games Studies program on this year’s Carolina Seminar. The seminar in Critical Game Studies allowed faculty and graduate students from KCL, Duke, and UNC to develop new methods in game studies research.
This project began after Prof. Gaspard Perluson from KCL visited UNC last spring to share his research in queer game studies, see Greenlaw Gameroom, and hold a workshop and seminar sessions for graduate students and faculty.
This grant will support Prof. Gotzler and two other UNC faculty members, Prof. Courtney Rivard in ECL and Prof. Joyce Rudinsky in Communications, as they travel to London in June to participate in a UNC-KCL symposium on “Game Studies and Ludic Teaching,” where they will share research works in progress and exchange effective strategies for games-based pedagogy.
In speaking to what Prof. Gotzler and his team aim to achieve out of this partnership, he said, “I hope this partnership can help continue to grow the vibrant intellectual community around game studies here at UNC and grow a sustainable and far-reaching community of collaboration and innovation in the study of games.”
Prof. Gutierrez will be working with Prof. Ross White to initiate a partnership with Queen’s University in Belfast. This partnership grew out of a visit from the faculty of Queen’s University to campus last fall.
Working with Queen’s University, Prof. Gutierrez and Prof. White plan to bring UNC students to Belfast to work at the Seamus Heaney Center. Prof. Gutierrez teaches a similar program at the University of Galway each summer in Life Writing, and he looks forward to “seeing if we can have a much more expanded program each summer involving other creative writing genres.”
Professor Gutierrez added, “The Life Writing in Galway program has been incredibly popular because it’s the only study abroad program that specifically teaches creative writing and the program is relatively affordable. We see an expanded study abroad program in Belfast as providing more opportunities for faculty and students not only to travel to Northern Ireland but to collaborate with the faculty and students there. We’d also love it if we could get students and faculty from Queens College to come to Chapel Hill. We’d also like to see if we can develop COIL partnerships with faculty over there.”
Professor Gutierrez looks forward to driving with Professor White “from Galway to Belfast on the left side of the road with a stick shift and hopefully avoid crashing into sheep (or ending up in a ditch).”
Congratulations to Prof. Gotzler and Prof. Gutierrez!
