2017 Art Dean's Lecture Series

Colin Campbell has been writing about video games and the video game industry for 30 years. Born in England, he moved to the United States to work on leading games publications such as Gamasutra, IGN, and now Polygon, where he is senior editor for politics and culture. Colin has also published a novel called Piranha Frenzy, about corruption in the game industry. He lives in Santa Cruz.

Bonnie Ruberg, Ph.D. is a Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar in the Interactive Media and Games Division at the University of Southern California and an incoming Assistant Professor of digital media and games in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine. Her research explores gender and sexuality in digital cultures, with a special interest in LGBTQ issues in video games. Bonnie is the lead organizer of the annual Queerness and Games Conference, the co-editor of the volume Queer Game Studies, and the author of a current book project titled Playing Queer: Sexuality, Gender, and Identity in Video Games beyond Representation.

An Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, TreaAndrea M. Russworm teaches classes on video games, digital cultural studies, and African American popular culture. She is a co-editor of the forthcoming book Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games (Indiana University Press, 2017). Her other books on media and representation include Blackness is Burning: Civil Rights, Popular Culture, and the Problem of Recognition (Wayne State University Press, 2016) and From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (University of Mississippi Press, 2016).

Alenda Chang is an Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara with specializations in environmental media and digital media, particularly games. Her writing has appeared in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Qui Parle, electronic book review, and the recent Routledge volume, Sustainable Media. Her current book project, Playing Nature: The Ecology of Video Games, develops environmental frameworks for understanding and designing digital games. At UCSB, Chang is also a co-founder of Wireframe, a new digital media studio that will support critical game design, data visualization, and media art and activism.

An Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, TreaAndrea M. Russworm teaches classes on video games, digital cultural studies, and African American popular culture. She is a co-editor of the forthcoming book Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games (Indiana University Press, 2017). Her other books on media and representation include Blackness is Burning: Civil Rights, Popular Culture, and the Problem of Recognition (Wayne State University Press, 2016) and From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (University of Mississippi Press, 2016).

Anna Everett is a Professor of Film, Television and New Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Her many publications include the books Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949; Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media, for the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media, Youth, and Learning program, her award-winning book Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace, and the edited volume Pretty People, among others. She is completing a book on President Obama, Social Media & Millennials.

Matthew Payne is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Television & Theater at University of Notre Dame specializing in the critical analysis of emerging media and the cultural history of video games. He is author of Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11 (NYU Press, 2016), and is a co-editor of the anthologies Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence (Routledge, 2011) and Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games (Routledge, 2010). Matthew has taught a range of media studies and film/video production courses at the university level, and he has conducted industry research for Warner Brothers. He is currently working on a book project that historicizes the influence of Ultima, an early computer role-playing game. Matthew also serves as a regional director for the Learning Games Initiative, a multi-institute research collective dedicated to archiving games and gaming ephemera, and to distributing these materials to educators for classroom instruction.