Sean Abellera (he/him) is a 3rd Year in English and Cinema & Digital Media at UC Davis. He is interested in audiovisual mediums such as video games, film, and internet media—especially in relation to storytelling.

Stacey Baran (she/her) is a third-year PhD student whose research focuses on film, genre theory, and ecocritical engagements with race, gender, and food studies. The subject of her current project focuses on representations of maize in American horror cinema - specifically how its visual motif invokes hauntological histories and speculative anxieties around food and racialization, regionality, and consumption in the national consciousness.

Arcadio Bolaños (he/him) has been writing comic book scripts for a long time, and his stories have been published both in print and digitally. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Spanish Department at the University of California, Davis. His dissertation is about masculinities, alternative sexualities and queer relationships in contemporary Peruvian narrative.

Alyssa Bui (she/her) is a 3rd year in Cinema and Digital Media at UC Davis.  She is a freelance digital illustrator whose work focuses on character design and drawing characters from video games and other media she enjoys.  She has a background in creating merchandise for art markets and conventions. 

Roxanne Demorest (she/her) is an English major interested in studying women writers and intersectional feminism. She spends most of her time creative writing and hopes to one day publish fiction.

Michael Dinh (they/them) is a graduating Computer Science and Cinema & Digital Media major at UC Davis. Primarily focused on game development and analysis, their library of work largely consists of bite-sized, humorous games in addition to broader work in relation to modern internet multimedia and culture. They are usually thinking about R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 on the original PlayStation.

Aria Di Simone (she/her) is a 4th year CDM major and English minor at UC Davis. She has always been fascinated with the storytelling aspect of video games and hopes to become a writer/graphic designer for RPG games. She has a background in writing and making video games in Unity.

Aaron Halverson (he/they) is a PhD candidate at UC Davis. They're a medievalist, with an interest in the formation of identity in medieval English literature. They're also a big fan of video games, and they're particularly intrigued in how video games utilize history within their narratives and gameplay.

Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s (she/her) poetry and nonfiction challenges the Western myth of progress by examining the devastating impact that agriculture and over-population have had, and continue to have, on the North American West. Taking an ecofeminist bent, her writing also challenges the American West’s male-oriented recorded history by researching the lives of women. Her fourth collection of poems, West : Fire : Archive was published by The Center for Literary Publishing in 2021. Dunkle wrote the first full-length biography on Charmian London, Jack London's wife, Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2020 (now available in audiobook). Her next biography Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb forthcoming from University of California Press in Fall 2024. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College, UC Davis and Dominican University and is the Poetry and Translation Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. 

Antonio Kazarian (any) is a second year English major, planning to graduate in the Fall 2024 quarter. After that they want to go to grad school to get their MFA in Creative Writing so they can join the video game industry as a Narrative Designer. 

Anabel Lares (she/her) is a third-year English Literature major. She transferred this Fall from Cosumnes River College.

Chih-ching (Dill) Ma (they/them) received their degrees in fine arts from Tufts University and in the humanities from the University of Chicago. Ma is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis. Their current research deals with Taiwanese literature, performance, and film, with particular interests in adaptation and remediation and how historical narratives are reinvented through these processes. 

Franklin Meyer (he/him) is a third-year graduate student in the History Program. His research focuses on Empire and Immigration in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century, although he was able to make a foray into technology and film history for this paper. Prior to attending Davis, Franklin was a clerk at the last video store in Minnesota. 

Jay Starling (he/him) is an English major Undergraduate with a passion for reading and writing. He enjoys daydreaming, thinking about the books he'll write one day, and writing character analysis papers for fun.

Harlin/Hayley Steele (they/ze/she/he) is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies, in the STS and Performance and Practice DEs. They've created games and interactive media for over two decades. Their article "The Maker Turn in Classroom Games: An Articulation of Gamemaking in Education" was published in the Proceedings of the 2021 GENeration Analog conference (Carnegie Mellon ETC Press, 2023). 

Angie Velarde (she/her) is an English (Creative Writing) undergraduate student at UC Davis. She is passionate about writing fiction, particularly speculative, surrealist and magical realist fiction. 

Rachel Wang (she/they) is a first-year Literature Ph.D. student at the University of California, Davis. Her work compares women's fashion and identity in eighteenth-century British literature and contemporary literature/popular culture. She is interested in how figures gendered as female use clothing to design their own identity and femininity, but also how clothing is used by society to design these figures through sign systems.

Lucas Wang (he/him) is a third-year undergraduate student studying Design and Cinema & Digital Media. He is  also working towards a minor in Computer Science. 

Robin Watkins (she/her) is currently a statistics major and is interested in video games research. She love sdiscovering trends and sharing what she finds with people.

Shaoni C. White (they/them) is a PhD student in Literature working towards a Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies at UC Davis. Their work is forthcoming in Extrapolation and Studies in Popular Culture.

Nyx Wright (she/they) is a 4th year in English at UC Davis. She is a writer and designer whose work focuses on the interactive storytelling mediums of video games and tabletop roleplaying games. She has a background in writing and video production for esports.

Ryan C. Wright (they/he) is a PhD student in the English Department and is pursuing a Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies. Their research focuses on how computational media has shaped speculative imaginaries since the 19th century. They received a MSc. in Game Design from the IT University of Copenhagen, and serve as copy editor and webmaster for the journal Game Studies.

Fangzhou Xie (he/him) is a second year undergraduate student studying EEB at the College of Biological Sciences. Gaming has been one of his biggest passions for many years and he is also an avid reviewer of games. 

Alenda Y. Chang (she/her) is an Associate Professor in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. With a multidisciplinary background in biology, literature, and film, she specializes in merging ecocritical theory with the analysis of contemporary media. Her writing has been featured in numerous journals, including Feminist Media Histories, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and Resilience, and her 2019 book, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games (University of Minnesota Press), developed innovative ecological frameworks for understanding and designing digital games. Along with Film and Media Studies professor Laila Shereen Sakr, Chang is also the co-founder of the digital media studio Wireframe.

Alenda Chang’s UCSB Profile

Gina Bloom (she/her) joined the UC Davis English faculty in 2007 and has since become affiliated faculty with the PhD programs in Education and Performance Studies. Before coming to Davis, she taught at the University of Iowa and Lawrence University. Her current areas of interest include early modern English drama (especially Shakespeare), gender and feminist theory, theater history and performance, game studies, digital arts/humanities, and education.

Stephanie Boluk (they/she) is an associate professor who plays, makes, and writes about games in the Cinema and Digital Media Department at University of California, Davis.

Hsuan Hsu (he/they) joined the UC Davis faculty in 2008. His research areas include 19th and 20th-Century U.S. literature, Asian diasporic literature, race studies, cultural geography, sensory studies, and the enviornmental humanities.

Katlin Marisol Sweeney-Romero (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media at UC Davis. She received her PhD in English with a specialization in Film Studies from The Ohio State University in 2023. Her dissertation, “Social Mediated Latinas: Creating and Contouring Digital Latina Looks in the Twenty-First Century,” examines how Latinas utilize their social media presence to act as both cultural producers of original content and participants in intracultural discourse related to ethnoracial identity.

Tobias Menely (he/him) joined the faculty at UC Davis in 2014, after teaching at Miami University and Willamette University. He is an ecocritic and environmental humanist, with a primary focus on British literature from Milton to the Romantics. He serves as the Chair of the Environmental Humanities Designated Emphasis and as the English Pedagogy Director. In 2024, he received a UC Davis Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award for Undergraduate Teaching.

Colin Milburn’s (he/him) research focuses on the relations of literature, science, and technology. His interests include science fiction, gothic horror, the history of biology, the history of physics, nanotechnology, video games, and the digital humanities. He is a professor in the English Department, the Science and Technology Studies Department, and the Cinema and Digital Media Department. He is also affiliated with the programs in Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, and Critical Theory, as well as the Center for Science and Innovation Studies. He is the department chair of the Science and Technology Studies Department, as well as the director of the ModLab digital humanities laboratory.

Margaret Rhonda (she/they) joined the UC Davis faculty in 2014 after teaching in the Department of English at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. She specializes in American poetry from the nineteenth century to the present.