Game Studies
My research focuses on games as cultural artifacts, examining how they reflect, reify, resist, or reimagine cultural norms and ideologies. Given that games and play have been a part of nearly every cultural formation throughout history, I believe it is important to study how games shape how we think and behave on both an individual and societal level.
Environmental Humanities, Ecocriticism, and Eco-media Studies
My work engages both implicitly and explicitly with the impact that media has in shaping our perception of, and relationship with the nonhuman world — particularly in the Anthropocene. Questions of agency, scale, time, and space guide my thinking and shape the questions that I engage with in my work. My expanded research will explore how the employment of nonhuman (i.e. plants, animals, or other microbial or geological formations) perspectives in games enable players to inhabit non-anthropocentric temporal and spatial perspectives. In doing so, I argue that such games employ frameworks through which players can explore new vantages of ecological realities, pushing back against technological modernity’s preference for immediacy and spectacle. I plan to use this trajectory to reframe slowness as not only a cultural form of resistance against the speed and exploitative ideologies of industrial capitalism, but also as a method for exploring temporal frameworks that exist outside of the anthropocentric rhythms of pleasure and progress.
Temporality and Slowness
Living in an era of progress driven by technological speed and shaped by globalized interconnectivity, it is significant to consider how current temporal regimes shape our media, culture, and norms. My work engages with both the anthropocentric temporalities of media, labor, and trade and the nonhuman rhythms of cyclicality, seasonality, and decay. I examine slowness and slow media as forms of resistance against the hegemonically progress-focused temporalities of industrial capitalism, embracing stillness, un-productivity, and delay as modes of reengaging with physicality, embodiment, and emplacement.
Media Materiality
As a scholar with roots in ecocriticism and ecomedia studies, I recognize the importance of acknowledging not only the rhetorics and ideologies of a text, but also the material realities of media production and consumption, considering how the materiality of media texts interacts with real ecological and environmental relationships. These questions grow ever more important as consumers’ experience with video games become increasingly intangible. With Playstation’s recent decision to employ digital-only distribution and Microsoft’s streaming/cloud-based gaming making games appear less material than ever, I consider how these increasingly digital modes of distribution potentially obscure the very real material impact of gaming culture, with great amounts of energy, data processing, and cooling required to produce and maintain gaming infrastructure--often at significant environmental cost.
Virtual Reality and New Media
With three years of experience in a digital media scholarship lab, I centralize virtual reality, AI, and games in my pedagogy and research. In thinking about the role that tech has in shaping our perception of the world and its reliance upon the smooth functioning of technological progress, I engage with new technology and new media forms from a critical perspective, engaging with the technological processes that create increasingly seamless "immersion" on a textual basis, but with a sociocultural foundation.
Videographic Criticism
Alongside my traditional written work, I have explored alternative forms of scholarship that engage with critical scholarship through the language of the texts that they examine. As part of this work, I have experience working in videographic criticism, co-founding the Videographic Criticism Research Group at Syracuse University and participating in a VC workshop lead by Catherine Grant in 2025. You can view a sample of my work published via Broadly Textual.