I have a BA in English Literature from Lewis & Clark College and an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago for my work with media studies and queer theory :)
In undergrad, I leaned towards poetry and experimental fiction courses. I read a lot of Russian literature, a lot of medieval lit, and took a few film classes. I also took my first Game Studies course, writing on the ways in which Animal Crossing: New Leaf creates investment in its core gameplay loop by balancing player control and “village autonomy” and rewarding behaviors of care. This is also around when I read Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto for the first time and started down the new media studies rabbit hole!
My senior capstone paper was on Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, which is still one of my favorite books, despite being very dissimilar to most of what I read these days. I wrote about the novel's relationship to hypertext and early electronic fiction, comparing its interactivity to the much more recent FMV game Her Story, and claimed that the "playability" of Pale Fire comes from a reader's ability to write and rewrite their interpretation of the text as they try to unravel the novel's opaque canon.
In 2021, I went to Chicago to get my master's degree (and also ended up getting a new gender). I worked closely with the amazing game studies scholars Patrick Jagoda and Chris Carloy on my thesis, as well as lots of other game studies coursework. I continued my detective game research with a short paper on temporal dissonance in Return of the Obra Dinn and took a platform studies course which led to my first (and only, so far) video essay on how platforms and their advertising have shaped gendered social gaming.
I also tried making a few games, including one about hair, the making of which was the catalyst for my first "guy haircut" and my trans awakening! Neat!
My master's thesis, "Trans Games, Transformed: Reclaiming the Monstrous in Queer Interactive Fiction," is my favorite thing I've ever written. It's a meaty discursive text, a Frankenstein of a text (which is relevant here) full of autoethnography, monster theory, and a history of the Twine game platform and its inextricable ties to the queer indie game scene. In it, I argue for the importance of horror in queer indie gaming communities, based on Kristeva’s established theory of the abject, the role of monsters as transgressors, reclaiming the monstrous, and queer audience identification with/recognition of the self in body horror narratives.
If you click the links up top, you'll find brief summaries and samples of some of my academic and creative writing.