Kelly Ancharski (2026)
Kelly Ancharski, MSW is a Doctoral Candidate in Higher Education with a minor in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. They are a gamer, lover of slugs, and sometimes poet-in-researcher form. Kelly earned a BA in Political Science from UA, School of Government and Public Policy and a Master of Social Work from New York University, Silver School of Social Work. In addition to their role as Managing Editor, Kelly is a Research Associate at the UA LGBTQ+ Institute. Previously, they were a Project Manager at the NYU McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research. Their dissertation focuses on trans world- and kin-making alongside Dungeons and Dragons gameplay and collective storytelling. They weave play, livingness, and storytelling to revel in the potentialities of trans worldmaking—the characters, players, worlds, and dice that we shape and shape us. They (unsurprisingly) enjoy TTRPGs, cozy video games, zine-making, jigsaw puzzles, and taking care of their neighborhood cats.
Aaunterria T. Bollinger-Deters (2026)
Aaunterria T. Bollinger-Deters Ph.D. is an instructor in the Department of Race, Gender, and Ethnic Studies, as well as being the interim Assistant Director of Educational Programming in the Survivor Advocacy and Foundational Education Center at Colorado State University. She studies Viral Murder Videos, Digital Black Feminisms, Cyberfeminisms, Critical Technocultural Discourse, Virtual World-Building, Erotic Gaming Cultures, Virtual Sex Work, Technosexualities, and the Exploitation film genres (Pornography, Blaxploitation, Grindhouse, and Horror). Aaunterria holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mass Communications and Media Arts from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale IL. (her hometown); specializing in Cinema, Photography, and Screenwriting as well as Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Aaunterria also holds graduate certifications in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Southern Illinois University, specializng in sex work and pornography; as well as a Master of Arts degree in Ethnic Studies from Colorado State University, specializing in identity politics, racialized womanhood, and media representations of race/ethnicity. As of May 2025, Aaunterria also completed her Ph.D. in Journalism and Media Communication with a focus on Public and Social Communication Technologies at Colorado State University with her work focusing on how Black women’s relationship to and with authoritative power is communicated in visual culture such as social media, Internet pornography, and video games.
Victoria Braegger (2025)
Victoria Braegger is an Assistant Professor of Technical Communication at Missouri University of Science and Technology. She earned a PhD in rhetoric and composition from Purdue University and a Master of Technical Communication and bachelor’s degrees in history and English from Utah State University. Her research is at the intersection of technical communication and game studies, focusing on peripheral design and UX/UI, constructions and maintenance of gamer identity, and accessibility in digital spaces. She has presented her work at Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW), and Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA). She has published work in Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics and in Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, and contributed chapters to The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom and Historiographies of Game Studies: What it Has Been, What it Could Be. She is a member of Not Your Mama’s Gamer and the Learning Games Initiative.
Zixuan Deng (2026)
Zixuan Deng is a doctoral candidate in the College of Information Science at the University of Arizona. She earned her M.A. in Contemporary Japanese Literature from the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona, with a focus on mobile phone game narrative and aesthetics. Her current research centers on game and affective system design, as well as designer practice and industrial history of romance games for female players, commonly known as otome games in Japan. Deng also serves as the Japanese Collection Coordinator for The Learning Games Initiative Research Archive (LGIRA) and is hosting a romance game exhibition later this year in collaboration with the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies (RCGS) at Ritsumeikan University, a leading academic organization in the field of game studies in Japan.
Raegan Harvey (2025)
Raegan Harvey is a graduate student at Texas Woman's University pursuing her MA in English, with a focus on Rhetoric and Composition. She holds a BA in English from Texas A&M University. Her research centers on disability justice and embodied rhetoric, examining how tabletop roleplaying games can work as tools for building skills such as self-advocacy and collaborative communication. Her scholarship, presented at local, regional, and national conferences, explores practical applications of TTRPGs in settings in and outside of the academy, and is grounded in her experience as a program assistant with TWU's Women's Thought Leadership Program, and as a lead writing consultant and peer mentor at TWU's Write Site.
Jeremy Johnson (2025)
Jeremy Miles Johnson is an independent game developer and professor of Video Game Development at St. Edward's University in Austin, TX. He primarily teaches classes on game design, production, and interactive storytelling. His work with students tends to focus on the development of educational games or games for social justice. In the past, he and his students produced minigames for Monstralia for the HealthStart Foundation. More recently they are collaborating with the Department of Counseling at St. Edward's to develop roleplaying game campaigns for use in group therapy. His personal creative works include board games, gamebooks, and video games where he can experiment with narrative in relation to game systems.
David Prihoda (2025)
David is an adjunct English professor and writing specialist (this is a job title, not a boast) at two small colleges in Kansas, as well as a PhD student and Adjunct Associate Professor of English at Old Dominion University. He teaches various writing and literature courses, including Creative Writing and Literature of Personal Discovery, but his passion is teaching game studies courses such as Game Criticism, Intro to Game Studies, and a class of his own design, Narrative in Esports. He is a passionate gamer. In addition to gaming, he always enjoys his wife's piano-noodling, Batman, parenthetical asides, and basketball. (He is a lifelong Lakers fan who has no idea what to make of their recent Luka Dončić acquisition.)
Ashley Rezvani (2025)
Ashley Rezvani has been studying and making games for almost a decade. After receiving her MA in Digital Games Theory and Design, she worked as a freelance serious game designer making educational games and museum exhibits about social justice topics, mostly for children ages 8-12. With a lifelong passion for teaching, she’s been lecturing in game design and game studies for six years, most recently as an Assistant Professor of Game Design and Interactive Media at the University of Montana. Her research interests include food in games, gender performativity in digital spaces, and using game design to de-bias players. When she’s not hunched over her computer and giving herself back problems, she’s hiking in the beautiful Rocky Mountains or baking bread.
Yasheng She (2026)
Dr. Yasheng She is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at North Carolina State University. Dr. She's work bridges cultural studies, gender and queer theory, and Asian/Asian American studies, with a particular focus on anime and games (both analog and digital) as visual culture. His Ph.D. is from UC Santa Cruz’s Film and Digital Media Department with an emphasis in Computational Media. Dr. She’s current project investigates how public memories of historical events shape (post)apocalyptic imaginations in global media. His scholarship has been published in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, including “Designing the Global Body: Japan’s Postwar Modernity in Death Stranding” in Made in Asia/America (Duke University Press, 2024) and “The Death of Aerith: Traumatic Femininity and Japan’s Postwar Modernity” in The World of Final Fantasy VII (McFarland, 2023).
Doug Stark (2026)
Doug Stark is Assistant Professor of Technology and Digital Media in the English Department at UT Arlington and Director of the Synthetic Humanities Lab, which incubates critical and creative inquiry into how generative media are reshaping what it means to be human. His current project, Preenactment, argues that many of our social roles originate in acts of make-believe – from pretending to cross the road as a child to prompting an AI to simulate a job interview as an adult. Doug’s work on games, media, and modeling has appeared in the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, Computers and Composition, Configurations, Leonardo, Eludamos, Extrapolation, Qui Parle, Post45, and other venues.