Degrees

2016, MA English, Loughborough University

2014, BA English, Loughborough University

Bio

Doug Stark is a media and game studies scholar completing a Ph.D. in English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. At UNC, he works for the Digital Literacy and Communications Lab as the Game Research Coordinator and teaches courses on film, video games, comics, digital media, and writing. Primarily, Doug’s research concerns twentieth and twenty-first century forms of play and game, treating them as both expressions of contemporary social conditions and means of adapting to our technocultural environments. His dissertation – “Playing with Habit: The Biopolitics of Games Under Neoliberalism” – addresses the power games exercise over life by examining the habits they promote in colonial, military, managerial, and entertainment contexts. Find his forthcoming and published work in journals Extrapolation, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, Post-45, Eludamos, Qui Parle, Leonardo, and Configurations, and in edited collections Playing the Field, Encyclopedia of Video Games, and Depictions of Power.

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Publications:

• Stark, Doug. “Exercises in Humility: Gregory Bateson on Contingency, Croquet, and Revising Habits of Thought Through Play.”Leonardo, 56 (1) 2023: 58-63.
• Stark, Doug. “Better Problems: Neoliberalism, Strategic Achronicity, and the Experimental Games To-Be-Made.” Qui Parle, 30 (2) 2021: 399-419.
• Stark, Doug. “Video Game Novels.” Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology and Art of Gaming, 2nd ed., edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, Greenwood Press, 2021: 1104-1107.
• Stark, Doug. “Training for the Military? Some Historical Considerations Towards a Media Philosophical Computer Game Philosophy.” Eludamos, 11 (1) 2021: 125–144.
• Stark, Doug and Teresa O’ Rourke. “The Lost Futures of BoJack and Diane.” Post45, special cluster “Leaving Hollywoo: Essays After BoJack Horseman,” 2020.
• Stark, Doug. “Unsettling Embodied Literacy in QWOP the Walking Simulator.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 12 (1) 2020: 49–67.
• Stark, Doug. “‘A More Realistic View:’ Reimagining Sympoietic Practice in Octavia Butler’s Parable Series.” Extrapolation, 61 (1-2), 2020: 151–171.
• Stark, Doug. “Ludic Literature: Ready Player One as Didactic Fiction for the Neoliberal Subject.” Playing the Field: Video Games and American Studies, ed. by S. Pöhlmann, De Gruyter, 2019: 153-173.

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Awards

• Digital Dissertation Fellowship, Carolina Digital Humanities, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2023
• Institute of the Arts and Humanities (IAH) Grant, “Critical Game Studies Exchange,” Spring 2023
• Richard Brooke Scholarship, UNC Chapel Hill, 2022-2023
• The Bruns Essay Prize, Society for Literature, Science & the Arts, 2022
• Hobby Departmental Dissertation Fellowship, UNC Chapel Hill, Fall 2022
• IAH Grant, UNC/KCL “Media Aesthetics” Speaker Series and Working Group, Fall 2022, Spring 2023
• Game Studies Research Award, DLC lab, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2022, Fall 2022
• Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) Fellow, UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2022
• IAH Grant, UNC/KCL “Digital Aesthetics” Speaker Series, Fall 2021
• Games and Cultures Humanities Lab Fellow, Duke University, 2019-2020
• Santander Postgraduate Scholarship, Loughborough University, UK, 2014-2016

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2016, B.A. English modified with Philosophy, minor in Ethics, Dartmouth College

Bio

Carly Schnitzler is a PhD candidate and teaching fellow studying digital rhetoric and computational arts and poetics.

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

BA English, Clemson University

Bio

Matt Duncan is a second-year PhD student and teaching fellow at the UNC Chapel Hill. His research explores the unique role of digital tools in shaping the composition classroom, with an emphasis on a low-bridge approach to the application of technology in writing curriculum. He is also Co-Editor of Fiction for Carolina Quarterly and is a Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative Project Management Fellow.

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Awards

• CDHI Project Management Fellowship
• CDHI Recruitment Fellowship
• Fred W. Shilstone Memorial Award
• Lucy K. Rollins Award

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2016, MA English, University of Virginia

2013, BA English, University of California Berkeley

Bio

Stephanie Kinzinger is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English and the Game Studies Initiative Project Manager in the Digital Literacy and Communications (DLC) Lab Gaming Initiative. She focuses on American literature, science, technology, and critical game studies and teaches courses in literature, video games, and multimodal composition and rhetoric. Broadly conceived, her research investigates experiments in the gamification of reality avant la lettre by considering select authors and game designers from the mid nineteenth century to the present who not only depict otherworldly fictions but also insist that such endeavors have the potential to make the world otherwise. Her dissertation –“Playing Reality: The Promise and Peril of Compositional Realities”– uses literary theory, play studies, and critical game studies to explore how the formal and political possibilities of video games are anticipated—and sometimes preemptively challenged—by American literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and to interrogate how the limits and possibilities of contemporary experiments in Virtual Reality offer new vistas for potentially recodifying current social structures.

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Publications:

• “Embodied Cognition in Edgar Allan Poe: Eureka’s Cosmology, Dupin’s Intuition.” Nineteenth-Century Literature. 1 December 2022; 77 (2-3): 124–144.

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Teaching Awards

• 2022 Professional Development Award, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Awards

• 2023 The James W. Gargano Award, for the outstanding article on Poe written in 2022, The Poe Studies Association
• 2023 John R. Bittner Award for Outstanding Work on a Dissertation in Literature, Popular Media, and Journalism, UNC Chapel Hill
• 2023 Digital Dissertation Fellowship, Carolina Digital Humanities, Digital Innovation Lab (DIL), UNC Chapel Hill
• 2023 Excellence in Critical Game Studies Award, Digital Literacy and Communications (DLC) Lab, UNC Chapel Hill
• 2023 Thompson-Lumiansky Departmental Dissertation Fellowship, UNC Chapel Hill
• 2022 Humanities Initiative Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

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Curriculum Vitae / Resume

Degrees

2014, BA English and French Literature, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Bio

My research focuses on gender, sexuality, and sensuality in the cinemas of the Maghreb and the Maghrebi diaspora in France. I’ve taught a variety of courses, including French, Arabic, film, and queer literature and culture, and I have experience teaching ESL and English composition to non-native speakers. As a Comparative Literature student, I enjoy doing interdisciplinary work through different departments at UNC, including English and Comparative Literature, Romance Studies, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and African Studies.

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Publications:

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• “Sensing and Self: A Haptic ‘Look’ at the Aesthetics of Women’s Labour in Contemporary Maghrebi and Maghrebi-French Diasporic Cinema.” French Screen Studies. Forthcoming.

Encyclopedia Articles

• “Al-Akharun (2006; Saba Al-Herz).” Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History. Howard Chiang, Anjali Arondekar, Marc Epprecht, Jennifer Evans, Ross G. Forman, Hanadi Al-Samman, et al, eds. (Farmington Hills, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2019).

Book Reviews

• Sensuous Cinema: The Body in Contemporary Maghrebi Cinema, by Kaya Davies Hayon. Review of Middle East Studies, 2021.
• Maghrebs in Motion: North African Cinema in Nine Movements, by Suzanne Gauch. Review of Middle East Studies, 2019.

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Teaching Awards

The Diane R. Leonard Award for Outstanding Foreign Language Instruction in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, 2019

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Awards

• Foreign Language Area Scholarship, African Studies: Standard Arabic and Moroccan Dialect in Fes, Morocco, Summer 2018.
• Foreign Language Area Scholarship, African Studies: Arabic, Summer 2016.

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