I’m Professor of English and Co-Director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago.
My research interests include Romantic-period literature, textual studies–which is concerned with the production, transmission, and reception of texts of all kinds in multiple media–and digital humanities, the intersection of humanities research and computing.
My forthcoming book, co-authored with George K. Thiruvathukal, is Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform (MIT Press, 2012), a contribution to the Platform Studies series edited by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort.
A 2008 book, The Meaning of Video Games, takes a textual-studies approach to games and game-related media, including Myst and LOST, Katamari Damacy and Otaku culture, Halo and I Love Bees, Façade, the Star Trek holodeck, and theatrical improv, Nintendo’s Wii platform, and Will Wright’s Spore.
Other publications have included books such as Satire and Romanticism (St. Martin’s, 2000)–a study of how satiric and romantic forms of writing helped to construct one another in the nineteenth century–
–and Against Technology (Routledge, 2006), about the historical Luddite movement (1811-17) and its neo-Luddite descendants, and about how in our down time the term “Luddite” has come to mean someone who is simply “against technology.”
