My research interests include Romantic-period British literature, textual studies, which is concerned with the production, transmission, and reception of texts of all kinds in multiple media, including digital media, and digital humanities, the intersection of humanities research and computing. My publications have included books such as Satire and Romanticism (2000) and The Satiric Eye, (ed., 2003), on Romantic-period satire, and Against Technology (2006), about the historical Luddite movement (1812-17) and how the term “Luddite” has come to mean someone who is simply “against technology.”

My recent book,The Meaning of Video Games (2008), takes a textual-studies approach to games and game-related media, including Myst and LOST, Katamari Damacy and Otaku culture, Halo and I Love Bees, Façade, the Star Trek holodeck, and theatrical improv, Nintendo’s Wii platform, and Will Wright’s Spore. In an essay for the January 2009 PMLA, I explore the connections between Second Life, video games, and textuality.

My book in progress, co-authored with George K. Thiruvathukal, is Codename: Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform (under contract and under review, MIT Press). It’s a contribution to the Platform Studies series edited by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, which offers critical investigation of “the relationship  between the hardware and software design of computing systems and the creative works produced on those systems.”

For more on my research, see my curriculum vitae.