Profile of Professor Astrid Ensslin BA/MA PhD PGCLTHE FHEA FRSA

Name:

Astrid Ensslin

Position:

Professor

Email:

a.ensslin@bangor.ac.uk

Location:

John Philips Hall, Office no.5 (first floor)

Phone:

+44 (0)1248 383619

My main research interests are in the field of Digital Humanities, in particular digital culture and communication. My current research revolves around electronic literature (esp. digital fiction) and videogames (esp. literary gaming), but I've also looked into virtual worlds, language ideologies in the (new) media and specialised language corpora. I have a BA/MA (Distinction) from Tuebingen University (2002), a Postgraduate Teaching Certificate from Leeds University and a PhD (s.c.l.) from Heidelberg University (2006). I have previously held teaching and research positions at the Universities of Leeds and Manchester. In 2004, I was awarded the First Prize in the Leeds Faculty of Arts Teaching Development Prizes. I convene Bangor University's Digital Economies Cluster. In 2012, I was appointed Fellow of the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) and elected Committee Member and International Chapter Officer for the Digital Games Research Association.

I am founding editor of the MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities and Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds and currently Investigator of two externally funded projects:

"Computer Gaming Across Cultures", funded by the British Council's UK-US-India Education and Research Initiative (approx. £50k; collaboration with the University of West Virginia and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
"Transformative thinking: Using digital fiction as a tool for improving body image", funded by the Welsh Crucible (approx. £9k; collaboration with Aberystwyth and Cardiff)

I am interested in supervising students who wish to do research in the areas of digital media (especially videogames, electronic literature and virtual worlds), discourse analysis, narratology, stylistics, communication studies and/or semiotics.

Courses taught since 2007:

Undergraduate:

UXS-1041 Introduction to New Media
UXS-1055 IT and Digital Communication
UXS-1036 Publishing - Past and Present
UXS-1060 Saint, Genius, Star
UXS-2041 Games and Virtual Environments
UXS-2037 Marketing Creativity
UXS-2039/3039 Transmedia Storytelling
UXS-3041 Advanced Games
UXS-3090 Dissertation

Postgraduate:

UXS-4045 Media & Cultural Theory
UXS-4044 Modes of Critical and Creative Research

Research student supervision:

I am currently supervising four PhD students:

Isamar Carrillo Masso, 'Positioning Video Games in Corpus-based Discourse Analysis: Towards a Unified Approach to the Study of Computer Games as New Media'
Xavier Laurent, 'Memory of Intelligent Virtual Agents in a 3D Environment: a Behavioural and Computational Approach'
Lyle Skains, 'Exploring Multimodal Creativity: Writing Stories for the Printed Page and the Digital Screen'
James Barrett, 'Reading Freedom: Techniques for the Control of Reading in Four Works of Digital Literature'

Successfully completed:

Dr Sonia Fizek, 'A Methodological Toolkit for Player Character Research in Offline Role-Playing Games' (pass with minor corrections, 08/06/2012)

Publications:

My publications fall largely within two areas of Digital Humanities:

Digital media and communication, especially digital fiction and narratology, videogames and virtual worlds, discourse analysis, semiotics and (meta-)communication
Applied Linguistics (English and German), particularly specialised corpora, discourse analysis and hypermedia-assisted language acquisition

Reviews and Peer-reviewing:

I have published reviews/entries in Journal of Sociolinguistics, Discourse Studies, Discourse and Communication and The Electronic Literature Directory.
I have peer-reviewed, upon invitation, for the AHRC, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), and the Fond National de la Recherche Luxembourg; Oxford University Press, Routledge, Sage, and Pearson Longman; and the International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Critical Discourse Studies, Contemporary Literature, Journal of Global Analysis, Transformative Works and Cultures, and Corpora.

Conference organisation:

'Creating Second Lives 2011: Blurring Boundaries', Bangor University, September 9th-10th, 2011 (co-organised with Dr Eben Muse).
WHiG Symposium, Bangor, July 18th-19th, 2011 (co-organised with Dr Cedric Krummes, funded by AHRC)
'The Future of Modern Languages in UK' conference, IGRS London, June 17th, 2011 (co-organised with Prof Naomi Segal, funded by MHRA)
'DFIN Workshop', Sheffield, August 17th-19th, 2009 (co-organised with Dr Alice Bell, funded by the Leverhulme Trust)
'Creating Second Lives: Reading and Writing Virtual Communities', Bangor University, October 24th-25th, 2008 (co-organised with Dr Eben Muse).

Grants and awards:

British Council UKIERI UK-US-India Trilateral Research in Partnership Grant, 'Computer Gaming across Cultures' (with Sandy Baldwin, University of West Virginia, and Saugata Bhaduri, Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi; 2013-15): £49,500
Welsh Crucible 2012 Grant, 'Transformative thinking: Using digital fiction as a tool for improving body image' (with Sarah Riley, Aberystwyth, Yi Gong and Joan Haran, Cardiff; 2012-13): £8,838
Welsh Crucible Researcher 2012 (funded by the St David's Day Group of Universities and HEFCW)
Bangor University 125th Anniversary Scholarship for PhD project, 'Positioning Video Games in Corpus-based Discourse Analysis', 2009-12
DFG (German Research Council) / AHRC Research Grant: 'What's Hard in German?' (with Anke Lüdeling, Humboldt University Berlin, 2009-12): £250,000
MeCCSA Poster Prize 2009 (Bradford), ‘"What an Un-wiki Way of Doing Things": Wikipedia’s Multilingual Policy and Metalinguistic Practice’
AHRC Collaborative Research Training: 'Digital and Collaborative Multimedia in the Humanities' (with Will Slocombe, Aberystwyth University, 2008-10) - a.k.a. 'CEDAR': £8,400
Leverhulme Trust: 'Digital Fiction International Network' (with Alice Bell, Sheffield Hallam University, 2009): £15,500
British Academy Overseas Conference Grant for AILA World Congress, Essen (2008)

Invited presentations / plenaries / keynotes / workshops:

(2012) 'The Language of Gaming: From Research to Teaching', teachers' workshop given at the British Film Institute's Media Conference 2012, London, 4 July 2012.
(2012) 'Literary Gaming: Between ludic digital literature and literary computer games', keynote given at CoDE 2012 conference, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, 28 March 2012.
(2012) 'Computer Gaming and the Art of Narrative', Cambridge Screen Media Group, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, 20 February 2012.
(2011) '"Staging Illusion": Metalepsis as a Transmedia Phenomenon', plenary talk at Staging Illusion conference, University of Sussex, 8-9 December 2011.
(2011) 'Literary Gaming as Metaludic Détournement', invited panellist at ASAP/3, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 27-30 October 2011.
(2011) 'Playing with Rather than by the Rules: Metaludicity, Allusive Fallacy and Illusory Agency in The Path', 'Literature between Media' symposium, Hedmark University College, Norway, 6 October 2011.
(2011) 'Playing with Rather than by the Rules: Between Ludic Digital Literature and Literary Computer Games', School of English seminar series, University of Heidelberg, 13 January 2011, and Computer Science seminar series, Bangor University, 16 November 2011.
(2010) 'Video Games/-ing, Digital Fiction and Virtual Worlds Research', BCS Animation and Games Development Specialist Group, Technium CAST, Bangor, 28th July 2010.
(2010) 'Metalanguage and the Ideology of Creationist Capitalism in Second Life', Language Development and Cognition Colloquium, Bangor, 11th February 2010.
(2009) 'New Media Writing: Towards Second Generation Criticism', keynote given at MeCCSA PGN Conference, Bangor, 9th July 2009.
(2009) 'Digital Literature as a Tool for (Foreign) Language Learning: Collaboration, Creativity, Transliteracy', Lancaster Literacy Discussion Group, Digital Methodologies series, Lancaster, 16th June 2009.
(2008) ‘Searching for Cultural Memory in Cyberspace: Califia, Marble Springs and the Mnemonics of Hypertext’, Intermediality Research Cluster Workshop, Bangor, 23 February 2008.
(2007) ‘Möglichkeiten und Perspektiven korpusbasierter Fachtextanalyse’, Facetten wissenschaftlicher Textproduktion und Methoden ihrer Analyse Seminar, Bergamo (I), 2-3 November 2007.
(with M. Durrell and P. Bennett, 2006) ‘Towards a methodology for constructing and annotating historical corpora: Tackling structural and lexical variability in Early Modern German newspaper texts’, Digital Historical Corpora Conference, Dagstuhl (D), 3-8 December 2006 .
(2005) ‘Literarischer Hypertext - literaturwissenschaftliche und linguistische Dimensionen’, University of Göttingen, 6 January 2005.
(2003) ‘Literary Hypertext in the EFL Literature Classroom, Or Literary Competence Revisited’, University of Heidelberg, 18 December 2003.

External examiner:

PhD, Queen Mary, University of London (2009-11)
PhD, Aberystwyth University (2010-11)
PhD, Umeå University, Sweden (2012)

Professional associations:

International Chapter Coordinator of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), 2012-15
Committee Member and Conference Coordinator of the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA), 2010-11
Member of: MeCCSA, ASAP, BAAL, ELO, ISSN, PALA, DiGRA and WiGS

Further esteem indicators:

Invited advisory board member, ESF Forward Look on ‘Media Studies: new media and new literacies’, Cyprus 17-18 May 2012.
Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts