About

About me

I received my Ph.D. from Washington State University in May 2010, and my B.A. and M.A. from the University of Idaho in 2002 and 2004. Pedigree-wise, I’m a mutt: I studied postmodern American literature for my M.A., writing my thesis on the late great David Foster Wallace. But after Wallace, I just couldn’t get jazzed about any other contemporary U.S. writers, so I began looking at other interesting cultural “texts” and landed on a type of “text” that I’ve loved since I was a kid (thanks, Dad): videogames. Still being an English major, I’ve found Rhetoric and Composition a more appropriate disciplinary home than Literature for analyzing videogames. Essentially, I approach videogames from the viewpoint of contemporary rhetoric, seeing them as cultural artifacts whose design reflects ideologies that are currently bouncing around U.S. culture. I’m especially interested in games’ potential expressive, persuasive, and educational roles in struggles for social justice.

My dissertation, which you can read right here, analyzes representations of race in World of Warcraft vis-à-vis  the ideological and political-economic history of racism in the United States.  Essentially, I argue that WoW conveys every major racial paradigm that’s held sway in the U.S. common sense over the last three hundred years, from Enlightenment-era biologism to twentieth-century postcolonialism; and that its ambivalent representations exemplify the fantasies and anxieties of whites in the postmodern world.

I currently hold a Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

About this site

Although the boundaries between “personal” and “professional” are fuzzy – especially for me, since I’ve made a profession of studying things that I personally love – this is a professional site. Let’s call it a portfolio-in-progress. As you can see, along with my CV and teaching record, my dissertation is here. Anyone who feels like reading it and commenting on it is welcome to do so. My hope is that my work, while obviously coming out of academia, won’t only be a conversation with other academics. I believe that academics should engage the public, especially when they study culture, as I do. This is especially true in the realm of videogames, discussions about which are 1) already hugely inclusive, involving designers, academics, journalists, and players from all over the world; and 2) already online. So: with this blog and dissertation, I officially throw my hat into this ring.