People

Principle Staff

Dene Grigar is Founder and Director of the Electronic Literature Lab. She also serves as the Director of the Creative Media & Digital Technology Program at Washington State University Vancouver, with research focusing on the creation, curation, preservation, and criticism of Electronic Literature, specifically building multimedial environments and experiences. She has authored or co-authored 17 media works, such as Curlew (with Greg Philbrook, 2014), “A Villager’s Tale” (with Brett Oppegaard, 2011), the “24-Hour Micro-Elit Project” (2009), as well as four print books, six multimedia books, and over 71 articles. She curates exhibits of electronic literature and media art, mounting shows at the Bibliotecha Hertziana&mdashMax Planck Institute of Art History. Library of Congress, British Computer Society, and for the Modern Language Association, among other venues. She serves as Associate Editor for Leonardo Reviews. For the Electronic Literature Organization she served as President from 2013-2019 and currently as its Managing Director and Curator of The NEXT. Her website is located at http://nouspace.net/dene.

Richard Snyder is Associate Director and Metadata Specialist of the Electronic Literature Lab who holds a PhD in English from Washington State University. His research focuses on intersections of word and image in literary media. As part of his dissertation research, he is currently developing the Early Modern Visual Reader (EMVR), a digital platform that remediates the experience of reading early modern literature within its own visual culture. Richard is Assistant Professor at Northwest College.

Holly Slocum is Project Manager and Senior Designer in the Electronic Literature Lab. She completed her B.A. in Digital Technology and Culture and specializes in user experience design, front-end web development, and digital preservation. Her work includes the reconstitution of several pieces of electronic literature, including Bill Bly's We Descend: Complete Edition, Richard Holeton's Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, Amnesia: Restored, and Deena Larsen's 17 hypertext kanji-ku poems. She also designed and manages the development of The NEXT, a multimedia museum and archive space owned by Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). Holly also serves as the Coordinator for ELO and designer for The Digital Review.

Greg Philbrook graduated from the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program and now works as the program’s information and instructional technician. As a developer, he headed the creation of Electronic Literature Organization’s (ELO) The NEXT and has produced the catalog for the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL). He participates in the preservation projects in ELL and has collaborated with media artists, Dene Grigar on “Curlew,” and John Barber on “Sound Spheres.” He has also served as the technical support at exhibitions curated by Grigar at the Library of Congress, ELO, Modern Language Association, and Digital Humanities Summer Institute.

Andrew Thompson is the lead developer of “The Future of Text in XR,” a project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He also serves as a born-digital preservationist, working on emulating Flash works and restoring and reconstructing born-digital works of art, literature, and games. He was the Project Manager for Amnesia: Restored, as well as a core developer on many other reconstructions, including David Kolb's Caged Texts, Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, and John McDaid's Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse. He also programmed the adaptation of Rob Swigart's game, Portal (Activision 1986) to the VR environment, a project called DATA ENTRY: PORTAL. Additionally, he works as a game developer using Unreal Engine 5 and Unity and serves on the Executive Team as a founder of CMDC Studios. Thompson holds a B.A. and a certificate in Video Game Studies & Design from Creative Media & Digital Culture in the Department of Digital Technology & Culture at Washington State University Vancouver.

Affiliated Scholars

John Barber, PhD, is a digital artist and scholar based whose work is predominantly focused on sound art, experimental live radio performances, and podcasts. Barber’s sound art has been featured in many international festivals and exhibitions. for example, Sounds of My Life was featured at Lisbon’s annual RadiaLx International Festival of Radio Art, Between Sleep and Dreams was included in events across Canada, Estonia, and Portugal, and Remembering the Dead was exhibited at the Paul Watson Gallery in Winona, MN and re-interpreted as Remembering the Dead: Northern Ireland, which was published in New Binary Press. Barber’s work has also been included in the Audiograft International Festival of Experimental Music and Sound hosted by Oxford Brookes University and Brazil’s Festival Internacional de Linguage Eletronica. As a scholar of media art and digital storytelling, Barber has been published in a range of journals and academic volumes, including Digital Humanities Quarterly, The Mobile Story, and Transdisciplinary Digital Art.

Mariusz Pisarski, PhD, is author of “Xanadu. Hypertextual metamorphosis of fiction” (Kraków, 2013). He has presented digital literacy projects at contemporary art spaces in Paris, Warsaw, Bratislava, Kosice and Vancouver and has translated American digital literature. He also serves as the chief editor of Techsty, a journal on new media and literature, and as creative director for multimedia in Korporacja Ha!art from Cracow.

Erika Fülöp is a Professor in 21st Century Literature, Digital Humanities, and Creative Writing at the University of Toulouse who explores recent and diverse modes of writing and authorship that question and expand the concept of writing and literature, including interferences between print books and networked writing, the impact of social networks on authorship, video writing on YouTube, and digital poetry and its translation. She has directed several projects and conferences around these subjects, including Screening the Literary (2016-17) and The Creative Web of Languages (2017-19). In 2020 she completed a monograph co-authored with Gilles Bonnet and Gaëlle Théval on French creative literary experimentation on YouTube (‘Qu'est-ce aue la LittéraTube?'), and in 2021, adventured into learning to code & co. thanks to an EPSRC grant in order to carry out truly interdisciplinary research and analyses of electronic literature.

Agnieszka Przybyszewska, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the University of Łódź in Poland and Visiting Research Fellow (2020-2022) at Bath Spa University, where she is conducting research on electronic literature as part of the Bekker Programme of Polish National Agency For Academic Exchange. Her research is focused on modern evolution in the concept of the book, the act of reading and literature itself, and includes diverse forms of textual materialism and electronic literature. Recently she focuses mostly on haptic and corporeal aspects of reading. Agnieszka is an author of an extensive monograph on liberature and liberacy (“Liberackość dzieła literackiego”, 2015), as well as of several dozens articles on emerging forms of storytelling and literary publications in peer-reviewed journals and collective academic publications (in Polish, English and Spanish). She is a member of Electronic Literature Organization and Polish Centre of Research on Electronic Literature, editor of The Writing Platform. She teaches academic courses on modern unconventional and innovative forms of print and digital literature and she was a co-author of a programme of Creative Writing studies at the University of Łódź. She is currently focused on writing a monograph on Kate Pullinger's digital writing (within NAWA project “From multimodal interactive narrative to small screen fiction and haptic, corporeal reading: Kate Pullinger and innovation in digital writing”) and she is a lead of a project of the author’s digital works archive (within IDUB project “Between (re)construction and emulation. Archiving and popularisation of electronic literature – Kate Pullinger's Archive”).

Post-Bacc Researchers

Sierra O’Neal is graduate in the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver who holds a B.A. in Digital Technology and Culture and a Certificate in Game Studies & Design. She specializes in 2 & 3D Animation and 3D Modeling and is responsible for the animations found at the Welcome and Exhibition spaces at The NEXT, as well as the gifs used in its many carousels. She served on the animation teams for the production of the games The Llama’s Wrath and Amnesia: Restored.

Ruth Woodcock is a Post-Baccalaureate Researcher in the Electronic Literature Lab who graduated with her B.A. in Digital Technology and Culture. With a background in HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, C, and other languages as well as front end design software like Adobe, she serves as one of the programmers on ELO’s The NEXT and also assists with content development for the space. She is also the developer the archival website for N. Katherine Hayles, a project begun in September 2021. Ruth also served as a programmer on the production of the video game, Quest for Arete.

Sydney Nguyen is a graduate of the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver who holds a B.A. in Digital Technology and Culture. She is a Junior Designer in the Electronic Literature Lab and was the lead designer and team lead for the adaption of Rob Swigart's 1988 novel, Portal into a VR game, DATA ENTRY: PORTAL. For The NEXT she is responsible for creating the images and the design of the lab's many promotional materials for exhibitions.

Ben Peterson is a graduate of the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver who holds a B.A. in Digital Technology and Culture and a Certificate in Social Media. As the Electronic Literature Lab's Video Producer, he manages every level of production and is responsible for all the videos published under ELL, as well as much of the promotion for "Re-Imagined Radio." He was also responsible for all the short form promotion as a Social Media Specialist for the remake of DATA ENTRY: PORTAL.

Visiting Scholars & Post Docs

  • Madison McCarthy, UC Santa Cruz, summer 2022
  • Julia Polyck-O’Neill, Ell Fellow, 2019-2020
  • Amy Spencer, ELL Fellow, 2019-2020
  • Élika Ortega (U.S.). Research into print manuals accompanying electronic literature. Spring 2018.
  • Piotr Marecki (Poland). Study of media archaeology lab. August 2017.
  • Monika Górska-Olesińska (Poland). Research into Stephanie Strickland's True North. September 2016.
  • Daniela Maduro (Portugal). Shapeshifting texts: keeping track of electronic literature. May-June 2016.
  • Ula Pawlicka (Poland). Fulbright Scholar. A study of electronic literature contributing to her dissertation. August 2014-February 2015.

Previous CMDC Undergraduate Researchers

Kathleen Zoller (2018-2023), Ariel Wallace (2021-2023), Ahria Nicholas (2021-2023), Austin Gohl (2022), Mariah Gwin (2017-2020), Andrew Nevue (2018-2020), Moneca Roath (2018-2020), Austin Fields (2018-2019), Katie Bowen (2017-2018), Vanessa Rhodes (2017-2018), Veronica Whitney (2017-2018), Madeleine Brookman (2015-2016), Amalia Vacca (2013-2015), and Seti Alizedeh (2012-2013)

Undergraduate Docents for Exhibits for Electronic Literature Exhibits

Setareh Alizadeh, Keeley Bitton, Madeleine Brookman, Nicole Buckner, Eli Campbell, Melissa Carroll, Hunter Crawford, Serena Devera-Taualo, Neita Faris, Evan Flanagan, Natalie Hendren, Morgan Hutchinson, Jason Lee, Kerri Lingo, Alan McGinnis, Gary Nasca, Kate Palermini, Greg Philbrook, Margarete Strawn, Nic Stevens, Amalia Vacca, Haley Zach