ELO Welcomes New Directors and LAB Members

update: 8/20/12

Following the wildly successful conference in Morgantown, ELO announces the addition of 2 new members to each of its boards. This year, Jessica Pressman and Davin Heckman join the Board of Directors, and Erik Loyer and Chris Funkhouser join the Literary Advisory Board.

These world class artists and scholars bring terabytes of talent to the organization. Having published extensively critically and creatively, the four have helped the field to expand and mature, spreading knowledge of e-lit around the globe.

All four scholars and artists have had long standing relationships with ELO. When ELO was in its early years, Jessica Pressman was the first person to serve in what is now the Managing Director position. Davin Heckman manages the Electronic Literature Directory. Both Chris and Erik have been actively involved in the ELO community, developing artistic and scholarly works that have advanced the field. (Read the complete bios below.)

In addition to adding new members, the Board meeting in Morgantown also featured a switch in Vice Presidents as Scott Rettberg completed his term and Talan Memmott was elected to replace him.  Carolyn Guertin was appointed to the newly created position of Director of Publications.

At the start of the meeting, Alexandra Saemmer from Paris 8 lab presented more information about ELO 13, an interim year conference in the planning for France.  More details on this first European ELO conference to follow.

At the end of the meeting, the current Board Members renewed their commitments, and all congratulated Sandy Baldwin, Dene Grigar, and the rest of the organizing committee on a tremendously successful conference.

Bios:

Chris Funkhouser directs the Communication and Media program at New Jersey Institute of Technology, is a Senior Editor at PennSound, and was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Multimedia University (Malaysia) in 2006. He is author of the critical volumes Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archeology of Forms, 1959-1995 (2007), New Directions in Digital Poetry (2012), the chapbooks Electro þerdix (2011), LambdaMOO_Sessions (2006), and a CD-ROM e-book, Selections 2.0 (2006).

Davin Heckman studies digital humanities practices that cultivate deliberative responses to the conditions of life in the 21st Century. He is the author of A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day (Duke UP).  Heckman serves as the Supervising Editor of the Electronic Literature Directory(directory.eliterature.org) and the Electropoetics thread editor at the electronic book review (electronicbookreview.com). In 2011-12, Davin was a Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen, where he began work on a new manuscript on the relationship between literature, criticism, and society in the digital age.  He is an Associate Professor of English at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan with his family.

Erik Loyer (erikloyer.com) uses tactile, textual, performative, and musical interfaces to tell stories with interactive media. The author of award-winning electronic literature works like Strange Rain (2011), Chroma (2001), and The Lair of the Marrow Monkey (1998), Loyer began his career as an intern at The Voyager Company and currently heads the interactive design studio Song New Creative (song.nu), develops story-driven interactive entertainment under the Opertoon label (opertoon.com), and is Creative Director for the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (scalar.usc.edu) and the digital humanities journal Vectors (vectorsjournal.org).

Jessica Pressman researches and teaches twentieth- and twenty-first century experimental American literature, digital literature, and media theory.  She taught at Yale University and received her Ph.D. in English from UCLA. Her monograph on digital poetics, Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media, is under contract with Oxford University Press; Close Reading Electronic Literature, a Collaborative Case Study of William Poundstone’s “Project for the Tachistoscope: [Bottomless Pit],” co-written with Mark C. Marino and Jeremy Douglass, is under contract with Iowa University Press; a collection on comparative textual media, co-edited with N. Katherine Hayles, is under contract with Minnesota University Press.  She is Articles Editor for Digital Humanities Quarterly and a member of the MLA Media & Literature Executive Committee. Jessica was recently honored with an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship. www.jessicapressman.com