Cody Mejeur, Director, Assistant Professor, Media Study

Cody Mejeur is Assistant Professor of Game Studies at University at Buffalo, SUNY. Their work uses games to theorize narrative as an embodied and playful process that constructs how we understand ourselves, our realities, and our differences. They have published on games pedagogy, gender and queerness in games, and video game narratives and player experiences, and they are currently the game director for Trans Folks Walking, a narrative game about trans experiences. They are Director of the Amatryx Gaming Lab & Studio in Media Study at UB. They also direct the Narrative for Social Justice (N4SJ) Initiative with the International Society for the Study of Narrative and work with the LGBTQ Video Game Archive on preserving and visualizing LGBTQ representation. They are editor at One Shot: A Journal of Critical Games & Play, and serve as Diversity Officer for the Digital Games Research Association.

Dave Pape, Associate Professor, Media Study

Dave Pape is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media Study. He works in the creation of interactive virtual environments, the development of tools for computer art and performance, and directs UB’s Game Studies program.

Josh Flaccavento, Visiting Assistant Professor, English

Josh Flaccavento is co-founder of Bleak Horizons Press, where he writes space-horror roleplaying games. He holds a PhD in English from the University at Buffalo and his poems and stories have appeared in Ampersand, Caesura, Sixfold and Littletell. A list of approved jokes about his Italian-American heritage and/or Southern upbringing may be obtained by writing to the Bubba Corleone Spaghetti Company, headquartered in Mayor’s Income, Tennessee.

Thomas Kline, Media Study

Thomas Kline is a writer, actor, amateur game designer, and graduate student in the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo. He received his BA in Creative Writing from SUNY Oswego, with concentrations in fiction and screenwriting. His academic work centers primarily around game studies, interactive narrative, and digital storytelling, with an emphasis on player-avatar interactions, metalepsis in game narratives, and rhetoric in games. His creative work spans short fiction, screenwriting, theatre, digital games, an alternate reality game, and several instances of performance art to name a few. 

Research interests: ludonarratology, character studies, game rhetoric

Dana Hunt-Locklear, Media Study

Dana Hunt-Locklear (she/they) is an Indigenous (Lumbee) game designer and artist interested in making the player feel: through aesthetics, atmosphere, and play.  Her research centers itself around affect, play used in bond-building, spectatorship as play, and how video games themselves are affective. She believes indie games are the foundation of the game design industry, and partiality of her research is dedicated to this as well as Indigenous identities in video games.

Dana’s favorite games include the BioShock series, Assassin’s Creed, Resident Evil, and OFF. 

You can find Dana over at: almondmilkisnotgood.carrd.co!

Timothy Georger, Media Study

Tim Georger is a Buffalo media theorist, teacher, and artist. His work primarily works with sound not only musically, but as a sculpted medium, and writes extensively on video games.

Research interests: Cultural criticism, Experimental & new media, Postmodern & avant-garde video game design, Ludonarrative, Media preservation, archeology, & lost media, Video game controls as expression, Generative and programmable music

https://timgeorger.carrd.co/

Blair Johnson, English

Blair Johnson is a poet and PhD candidate in the University at Buffalo Poetics program. She received her MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. Her poems have been published in Diagram, Boston Review, and Best American Experimental Writing. She is the book and web designer for Essay Press. In collaboration with her partner Luke Williams, she makes code poems and handmade books.

Research interests: concrete and visual poetry, digital poetics, translation studies, materiality, twenty-first century poetry and poetics

https://blairjohnsonpoetry.com/

Hanyu Liao, Media Study

Max Wilde

Eliana Freeman, Computer Science

Eliana is a Computer Science major at UB with interests in game design and development, including using contemporary game engines to make original games and stories.

Jocelyn E. Marshall

Dr. Jocelyn E. Marshall (she/they) is a Postdoctoral Fellow supported by the American Association of University Women, and she previously was a Dissertation Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center. They are faculty in the Departments of Visual & Media Arts and Writing, Literature, & Publishing at Emerson College. Her interdisciplinary projects focus on contemporary U.S.-based diasporic women and LGBTQ+ artists and writers, researching relationships between historical trauma and queer and feminist activism. Their work has been supported by the Mark Diamond Research Foundation, New York Public Library, John Burton Harter Foundation, Trauma Research Foundation, Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory, and several home institutions and professional organizations. Her research is featured or forthcoming in the Journal of American Culture, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Public Art Dialogue, and Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics, among others. They have also curated exhibitions of contemporary art, film, new media, and performance, including Being In-Between | In-Between Being (UB Art Galleries, 2020-21) and Creativity in the Time of Covid-19 – Buffalo NY (multi-site, 2023). In 2022, she co-edited a collection on Trauma-Informed Pedagogy: Addressing Gender-Based Violence in the Classroom, and in Spring 2023 edited an issue of Rutgers University’s feminist journal Rejoinder, themed “Textual-Sexual-Spiritual: Artistic Practice and Other Rituals as Queer Becoming and Beyond.” One of their current book projects, tentatively titled “Dissent Nearby: Diasporic Feminism & U.S. Imperialism,” won the 2024 National Women’s Studies Association – University of Illinois Press First Book Award, and they presently Co-Chair the Gender & Feminisms Caucus at the Society for Cinema & Media Studies while serving on the Editorial Board of Art Journal.

Research interests: Contemporary U.S. literature and art, U.S.-based diasporic women writer-artists, new media art, queer and transnational feminist studies, gender and sexuality studies, performance, film, and visual studies, border and diaspora studies 

https://linktr.ee/jocelyn.e.marshall

Joan Nobile

Joan Nobile (she/her) is a queer artist-scholar based in Buffalo, NY. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University at Buffalo and works in the Media Study department as a Teaching Assistant. She received her BA in Media Production at SUNY Buffalo State. Her multidisciplinary practice involves works in film, video, zines, and video games. Broadly, her research focuses on media theory and critique, gaming, glitch aesthetics + theory, cyberfeminism, mental health, and the connection between parasocial relationships + stochastic terror.
She currently lives in Buffalo, NY with her partner.

https://joannobile.myportfolio.com/

Katie Brazzell

Rachid Benharrousse

Rachid Benharrousse is a Doctoral Candidate at Mohammed V University in Rabat. He is a Research Fellow at the African Academy for Migration Research (AAMR), University of Witwatersrand; Research Fellow at Palah Light Lab, University at Buffalo, SUNY. Benharrousse was an Early Career Researcher at the Association of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies (AMEWS), a Research Collaborator at the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking (PICT), and a Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. His research interests encompass Game Studies, Cultural Studies, Literary Studies, Digital Studies, and Migration Studies.

 Benharrousse is finalizing his dissertation and preparing to be an adjunct professor next semester at Mohammed V University in Rabat. 

Morgan Sammut

Morgan Sammut is a recent graduate of Mount Holyoke College, where they studied English and computer science. Previously, they were an undergraduate lead at the Palah Light Lab. Morgan’s interests include electronic literature, video games, and hybrid writing. Their work has appeared in the Mount Holyoke Review and will be appearing in the art exhibition at the 2022 International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling. They are currently working on a science-fiction collection about embodiment. You can find their work at https://mrgnsmmt.itch.io/.

Madison Ford

Austin Wilson