Reader Biographies
N. Katherine Hayles
N. Katherine Hayles is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los
Angeles, and the James B. Duke Professor of Literature Emerita at Duke University. She writes on
the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is the
author of the multiple prize-winning How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics. Her most recent book is Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive
Nonconscious.
J Yellowlees Douglas
Yellowlees Douglas has dedicated over 35 years to studying how writing works, including one of
the first-ever studies of student writing outcomes in online classrooms, conducted in 1986. Her
interest in how reading works in novel environments, like hypertext fiction, led her to discover
the cognitive, linguistic, and psychological bases for reading comprehension and recall. Her
interest in writing led to over 60 publications spanning more than a dozen disciplines, ranging
from management and computer science to genetics, ophthalmology, gastroenterology, and pulmonary
medicine—including one study currently being used in research on COVID-19. Her fiction was
selected for Post Modern Fiction: A Norton Anthology, and her two most recent books, The
Reader’s Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer (2015) and The Biomedical Writer:
What You Need to Succeed in Academic Medicine (2018) were both published by Cambridge University
Press.
Douglas is a veteran and founder and director of four writing programs, including a writing in
the disciplines program, a university-wide first-year writing program, a program in business
communication, and an NIH-funded program for faculty, dedicated to writing grants and
manuscripts in basic, translational, and clinical medicine, all at the University of Florida.
For 15 years, Yellowlees was also a copywriter and partner in an advertising agency with
branches in New York, Philadelphia, and London, catering to Fortune 500 clients, including
AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, CunardSeabourn Cruise Lines, and Abbott Laboratories.
Douglas was a contestant on Jeopardy! in 2013 and one of the authors of an amicus curiae brief in
the US Supreme Court Case, Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Assn., argued in 2010.
Douglas received her BA and MA degrees in English Language and Literature from the University of
Michigan and her PhD in reading and writing in post-secondary education from New York
University. She is currently Director of Writing and an Associate Professor of English at Holy
Names University, in Oakland, CA.
Stuart Moulthrop
Stuart Moulthrop received his first copies of Storyspace and afternoon from Michael Joyce in
1985. His Yale PhD dissertation contains an 18-page coda on afteroon, which his ultimate
dissertation advisor, J. Hillis Miller, called the best part of the project. In 1988 Moulthrop
was part of the TINAC salon (Textuality, Intertextuality, Narrative, and Computing, or This Is
Not a Conference), which allowed Joyce, John McDaid, and himself to spend many aimless hours in
Nancy Kaplan's Ithaca kitchen. Other TINAC alumni include Yellowlees Douglas, Jay David Bolter,
and official non-member Carolyn Guyer.
Moulthrop's electronic publications include the Storyspace work Victory Garden (1991), which
Robert Coover once called a "benchmark" for digital writing, plus a host of works in various web
platforms, from Hegirascope (1995, 1997) to Dread Box (2020). In 2007 two of Moulthrop's efforts
won international prizes prizes for electronic fiction and poetry. In 2001, Moulthrop and Kaplan
founded the School of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore, whose
M.A. program briefly included Chris Klimas, who proposed the Twine digital writing platform as a
thesis project in 2008. He left the program with his teachers' reluctant blessing in order to
concentrate on Twine.
Moulthrop moved to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2010. He hosted the ELO annual
conference there in 2014 and the next year, with Dene Grigar, launched the NEH-supported
Pathfinders project to document the experience of early electronic literature. This led to the
book Traversals: The Uses of Preservation for Early Electronic Literature, (Moulthrop and
Grigar) from MIT Press in 2017. Teaching game studies and electronic literature brought
Moulthrop to the now thriving Twine world, and in 2018 he joined an ongoing research project by
Anastasia Salter, leading to Twining: Critical and Creative Perspectives on the Twine Platform
(Salter and Moulthrop), forthcoming from Amherst College Press. Moulthrop is Distinguished
Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
John McDaid
John G. McDaid (@jmcdaid) is a science fiction writer, singer-songwriter, and freelance
journalist from Portsmouth, RI. His 1993 hypermedia novel, Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, was
one of the subjects of the 2017 book, “Traversals,” from MIT Press. As a member of the TINAC
collective, he has spoken on digital narrative at dozens of colleges and conferences. An MFA
candidate in fiction at Salve Regina University, he is currently working on a WWII alternate
history novel and an album of original music. Songs and fiction at harddeadlines.com.
Walter Vannini
In 1992, hypertexts were going to revolutionise literature and the world, and Vannini had all it
took: an MS in CS, experience as a hypertext researcher, a signed copy of Ted Nelson's Literary
Machines and Italy's first copy of HyperCard. So it was only natural that from his encounter
with Michael Joyce would erupt a time-defying friendship, a passion for StorySpace and the crazy
idea to attempt a world first: translating "afternoon, a story", the world's first literary
hypertext, from English to Italian.
The translation (or, rather, the port) saw the light in early 1993 in the form of a
booklet-plus-double-diskette (the kind now considered to be a 3D print of the "save" icon)
published by Castelvecchi Editore and Human Systems (Vannini's company); it featured "afternoon"
in Italian, the first inter(net)view with Michael Joyce and the first hypernovel by an italian
author, "RA-DIO" by Lorenzo Miglioli.
The operation was well received in market terms, then the World-Wide Web came around and the
world completely failed to change as expected.
Vannini today is a certified GDPR auditor, still unable to understand why writing software is so
bloody primitive and only occasionally holding a towel and raising a hopeful thumb to the sky.
Mariusz Pisarski
Mariusz Pisarski: translator, editor and director of several digital literature projects in
Poland, including translations of Michael Joyce’s afternoon. a story (Kraków 2011) and Twilight.
A Symphony (Kraków 2015). The former is an edition published on a CD-rom for offline reading in
browsers, the latter a full online edition. He is also an editor and co-author of Michael Joyce.
Polski Pisarz (2011, eng. Michael Joyce. A Polish Writer) – a digital monograph on Joyce with
interviews and articles partly focusing on writer’s affiliations with Polish Americans and
Polish culture.
He holds a PhD on hypertext fiction and is currently an assistant professor at the Department of
Journalism and Media, University of Technology and Communication in Rzeszów, Poland and at the
Department of Philosophy, University of Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovakia.
Arnaud Regnauld
Arnaud Regnauld is Professor of American Literature and Translation Studies and Vice-President
for Research at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis. After writing extensively on
John Hawkes’ later works, he has conducted research on Carter Scholz, Gary Lutz, Diane Williams
and Matthew Derby’s short-stories, Percival Everett, Ben Marcus, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and
Richard Powers’ novels, Jim Rosenberg’s electronic poetry as well as on Mark Amerika, Michael
Joyce, Shelley Jackson, Illya Szilak and Grégory Chatonsky’s digital and print works. He is the
author of a monograph on Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (to be published in 2020) and the
editor of several collective works, the most recent ones being The Digital Subject, Dijon: Labex
Arts-H2H-Presses du réel, 2017 and Subjectivités numériques et posthumain, Presses Universités
de Rennes, 2020. His most recent research focuses on new forms of textuality in the digital era
and their translation as well as on the relationship between art, literature and philosophy.
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of
Maryland, and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies. He is the author of
Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008) and Track Changes: A
Literary History of Word Processing (Harvard UP, 2016). Most recently he co-founded and
co-directs BookLab, a makerspace, studio, and community press dedicated to teaching the creative
and experimental book arts. He has been spending afternoons (and mornings and evenings) with
afternoon for about 25 years now, ever since he first heard someone say "poetry" and decided he
wanted to hear about it.
Maria Engberg
Maria Engberg is Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Media Technology,
Malmö University, Sweden.
Ph.D. in English (dissertation on digital poetry, Uppsala University, 2007).
Engberg is the Director of the research program Data Society at Malmö University
(mau.se/datasociety). She is also an Affiliate Researcher with the Augmented Environments Lab at
Georgia Tech. Main research interests include digitalisation, digital humanities, computational
media, augmented, mixed & virtual reality, media theory, urban media, and media aesthetics.
Forthcoming work include Reality Media (with Jay David Bolter and Blair MacIntyre, MIT Press).
Heather Malin
Heather has nearly 20 years of leadership experience in institutional advancement and financial oversight, working with organizations in a number of sectors, including higher education, healthcare, and the arts. She has created successful strategies and sustainable fiscal models, and led highly effective teams. Heather has also worked in the for-profit sector, and has particular expertise in project management and systems development.
Heather graduated from Vassar College with a B.A in English with a focus on electronic texts and literary theory.
Dene Grigar
Dene Grigar is Professor and Director of The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV). She is a curator of media art and electronic literature, creating exhibits for venues and organizations, such as the Library of Congress, the Modern Language Association, the ELO. She is also the author of media art works, such as “Fallow Field: A Story in Two Parts” and “The Jungfrau Tapes: A Conversation with Diana Slattery about The Glide Project,” both of which appeared in Iowa Review Web in October 2004, and When Ghosts Will Die (with Canadian multimedia artist Steve Gibson), a multimedia performance piece that experiments with motion tracking technology to produce narrative. She is also a recipient, with Stuart Moulthrop, of a 2013 NEH Start Up grant for a digital preservation project, entitled Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature and co-author with him on the book entitled, Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing. In 2016 she was awarded the Lewis E. and Stella G. Buchanan Distinguished Professorship at WSU. She directs the Electronic Literature Lab at WSUV.
Astrid Ensslin
Astrid Ensslin is Professor in Digital Humanities and Game Studies who divides her teaching and research activities between the Departments of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta. Prior to her arrival, she held faculty, research, and teaching positions in the UK, at the Universities of Leeds, Manchester and Bangor. Her main publications include Literary Gaming (MIT Press, 2014), Analyzing Digital Fiction (Routledge, 2013), The Language of Gaming (Palgrave, 2011), Creating Second Lives: Community, Identity and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual (Routledge, 2011), Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions (Bloomsbury, 2007), and Language in the Media: Representations, Identity, Ideology (Bloomsbury, 2007). She is the Principal Editor of Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds and has led externally funded research projects on videogames across cultures, reading and analyzing digital fiction, and specialized language corpora. In her previous post at Bangor University she was Deputy Dean (Research) for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.
