Meet the Advisory Board at Center for Digital Narrative

The Center for Digital Narrative, led by Scott Rettberg and Jill Walker Rettberg, will be focused on digital narrative – forms of contemporary storytelling at the intersection of human intelligence, computational systems, and algorithmic processes, which we all produce, share, and scroll past each day. 

The Center will benefit from an independent, international Scientific Advisory Committee including Crystal Abidin, Associate Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University; N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University; Serge Bouchardon, Professor of Information and Communication Science, UTC Sorbonne; Hartmut Koenitz, Professor of Interactive Narrative Design, HKU University of the Arts Utrecht; Kishonna Gray, Associate Professor of Digital Studies, University of Kentucky; and Rui Torres, Professor of Communication, University Fernando Pessoa. These distinguished advisors will visit the Center periodically to confer with our PIs about project progress, advise on research strategy and challenges, and help us connect with diverse research communities. Read more about their expertise below. 

Kishonna Gray

Kishonna Gray is currently Associate Professor in Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her scholarship is influenced by her interdisciplinary training and grounded in critical race theory and feminist approaches to knowledge production. She interrogates the impact that technology has on culture and how Black users, in particular, influence the creation of technological products and the dissemination of digital artifacts. While her extensive publication record explores how technology disparately impacts women and people of color, her current research interrogates the possibilities and potentials of what that technology can afford Black communities who are traditionally excluded from public spaces, including digital ones.

Hartmut Koenitz

Hartmut Koenitz is an Associate Professor at Södertörn University in Sweden, a visiting researcher at the University of Amsterdam, and a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin. Koenitz holds a PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology on the theory and practice of Interactive Digital Narrative. His upcoming book “Understanding Interactive Digital Narratives” is currently in production to be published by Routledge in April 2023. His research is concerned with the theory, practice, education and societal impact of interactive narratives and games. He has published over 70 scholarly publications including the co-edited volume Interactive Digital Narrative – history, theory and practice (Routledge 2015). He is also a visual artist, and his works have been shown in Atlanta, Paris, Istanbul, Seoul, Copenhagen and Porto.

Crystal Abidin

Professor Crystal Abidin is an internationally-renown socio-cultural anthropologist and ethnographer of influencer cultures, online visibility, and social media pop cultures. She is Professor and ARC DECRA Fellow in Internet Studies at Curtin University; Director of the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab; Founder of the TikTok Cultures Research Network; Deputy Director of the Korea Research Centre; and Programme Lead of Social Media Pop Cultures at the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University. She is also Affiliate Researcher with the Media Management and Transformation Centre at Jönköping University. Crystal has published 6 books and over 80 articles and chapters on various aspects of internet cultures. She has won grants from the ARC, Facebook, Handelsrådet, ICRC, and SSRC, among others, and her scholarship has been featured in the international press of over 30 countries.

Serge Bouchardon

Serge Bouchardon is Professor at the Université de technologie de Compiègne (Alliance Sorbonne Université, France), where he teaches interactive writing. His research focuses on digital creation, in particular digital literature. As an author, he is particularly interested in the way the gestures specific to the Digital contribute to the construction of meaning. His creations have been exhibited in many venues in Europe, America, Africa and the Middle East. They have been selected in various online reviews (bleuOrange, Hyperrhiz, SpringGun, The New River). The creation Loss of Grasp won the New Media Writing Prize 2011.

N. Katherine Hayles

N. Katherine Hayles is the Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University. Her research focuses on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21^st centuries. Her twelve print books include Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational (Columbia, 2021), Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017) and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Univ. of Chicago Press 2015), in addition to over 100 peer-reviewed articles.  Her books have won several prizes, including  The Rene Wellek Award for the Best Book in Literary Theory for How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Literature, Cybernetics and Informatics, and the Suzanne Langer Award for Writing Machines.  She has been recognized by many fellowships and awards, including two NEH Fellowships, a Guggenheim, a Rockefellar Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, and two University of California Presidential Research Fellowships.  She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She is currently at work on Technosymbiosis: Futures of the Human.

Rui Torres

Rui Torres graduated in Communication Sciences (UFP-University Fernando Pessoa); holds a master's and a doctoral degree in Luso-Brazilian Literature (UNC-Chapel Hill, U.S.A.); was a postdoctoral fellow of the Foundation for Science and Technology (Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil); and completed his aggregation in Information Science - Multimedia Studies (UFP). He is a professor at UFP and teaches courses in communication, semiotics and hypermedia - their intersections and methodologies. He has books, articles and other publications on literature, communication and cybertextualities. He is the director of the Cibertextualidades book collection (Publications Fernando Pessoa Foundation) and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Electronic Literature Series (Bloomsbury Academic Publishing).