Astrid Ensslin Appointed Associate Professor at UiB Digital Culture

Astrid Ensslin has been appointed associate professor of digital culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. Prior to that she held professorships at the University Alberta (Canada), where she was also Director of Media and Technology Studies, and at Bangor University (UK), where she was Deputy Dean (Research) in the College of Arts and Humanities.

Ensslin’s research sits at the multiple intersections between digital media/culture, literary/narrative studies and applied linguistics. She is Principal Investigator of the SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) project, Writing New Bodies: Critical Co-design for 21st Century Digital-born Bibliotherapy, which is developing an interactive web app for body image narrative therapy in close collaboration with Carla Rice (Guelph), Sarah Riley (Massey, NZ), and Christine Wilks (Bath Spa, UK). Ensslin’s previous research on the intersections between the body and digital technology, on deep learning and speech recognition in narrative videogames, on computer games across cultures, on empirical, cognitive reading/audience research in digital narrative, and medium-specific analysis of digital-born fictions was funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, SSHRC, the British Council, and the Leverhulme Trust. Earlier in her career she led projects in specialized language corpora, funded by the AHRC, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and ESRC (UK). Ensslin is a Director of the Electronic Literature Organization, for which she leads the Electronic Literature Directory (with Joseph Tabbi), teaches the Digital Humanities Summer School at the University of Victoria (CA) course on “Digital Fictions, Electronic Literature, Literary Gaming” (with Davin Heckman), edits the open-access Bloomsbury “Electronic Literature” book series (with Helen Burgess, María Mencía, and Rui Torres) and convenes the ELO Fellowship scheme.

"Astrid brings deep knowledge of both game studies and electronic literature to our program," said Scott Rettberg, Digital Culture coordinator, "and she publishes new research in both fields at an almost-alarming rate. We are delighted to have her as a colleague, and grateful to her for making the transcontinental voyage during a pandemic to join our program."

Ensslin’s latest book on Pre-Web Digital Publishing and the Lore of Electronic Literature is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press (2022). She’s developing a new monograph (with Alice Bell) on Reading Digital Fiction: Language, Cognition, Mediality (Routledge, 2023) and co-editing the Routledge Companion of Literary Media (with Bronwen Thomas and Julia Round, forthcoming 2023).

Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis, co-authored with Alice Bell, appeared with Ohio State University Press in February 2021. Ensslin and Bell gave a talk about their book last Thursday, March 11th, at 17:00 (CET) over Zoom, for which the listing is here. A full list of Ensslin’s earlier books and other publications is available here.

Ensslin co-leads the Research Group for Digital Culture.