Keynote

Kevin Moberly is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Digital Media, and Game Studies at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. His research focuses on understanding how digital manifestations of popular culture reflect, contribute to, and transform contemporary cultural, political, and historical discourses. In particular, he is interested in the ways that contemporary video games encode labor, often blurring already uneasy distinctions between work and play. His work has appeared in a number of journals and scholarly collections, including Computers and Composition, Eludimos, Kairos, Works and Days, Studies in Medievalism and This Year’s Work in Medievalism. Kevin is currently serving as the program director of ODU’s IDS Monarch Institute for Game Design and Development, which he helped establish in Fall 2019.

Brent Moberly holds a doctorate in medieval English literature from Indiana University, where he still works as a software developer. His current academic work focuses on play, spectacle, labor, and landscape in contemporary medievalist production. He has collaborated with his brother, Kevin Moberly, on a number of chapters and articles on medievalism and popular culture, particularly in computer games. His latest essay (co-authored with Kevin), “’Castles are like possessions: merely temporary!’: Neomedieval Architectural Praxis in Stronghold: Crusader II,” appeared in Studies in Medievalism XXXII: Medievalism in Play (2023), and he and Kevin were recently awarded Best Presentation for their paper “Fail Backwards: Bridging STEM and Medieval Studies through Critical Game Design” at the 2023 Teaching the Middle Ages and Renaissance to STEM Students digital symposium.