Faculty
Cody Mejeur, Director, Assistant Professor
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.
Graduate Students
Famous Clark
My name is Famous Clark. I am a current MFA student within the University at Buffalo’s Media Study program. My specific field of study is an interweaving of mythology and folklore, queer and feminist scholarship, and interactivity and portrayal within games. My research and projects to date aim to develop queer allegories of being utilizing tropes of fantastical narratives in folklore and fairytales. These allegories, in turn, are injected into game mediums, facilitating the embodiment, interactivity, and portrayal of non-heteronormative realities.
Research interests: Using folklore and classical fairy tale literature in conjunction with video games to engage in discussions of the queer fantastical, afro-futurisms, and cultural minority-based projections of layered realities, media, and the a-historical.
https://famous-clark-cv.vercel.app/
Timothy Georger
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
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
Jocelyn E. Marshall
Jocelyn E. Marshall is affiliated faculty in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College. Her research focuses on the relationships between intertextual practice, displaced positionality, and traumatic experience in work by contemporary women and queer artists. They are currently working on a hybrid memoir about their near-fatal traumatic brain injury, homophobic medical care, and slippages of memory, identity, and language. In addition to curatorial and editorial projects, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of American Culture, Public Art Dialogue, Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics, Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry, and elsewhere.
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/
Sarah Sgro
Undergraduate Students
Mohammed Azman
Hannah Kloss
Kevin Hernandez
Zachary Futerman
Iam Monroe
External Members
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.
Jordan Clapper
Madison Ford
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/.
Wes Turner