Board of Directors

 

 

 

Astrid Ensslin

Astrid Ensslin is Professor in Digital Cultures and Communication at the University of Regensburg who supervises students in Media, Communication, Literary, Cultural and Area Studies. Previously, she held faculty, research, and teaching positions in the UK, at the Universities of Leeds, Manchester and Bangor, and in Canada at the University of Alberta. Her main publications include Literary Gaming (MIT Press, 2014), Analyzing Digital Fiction (Routledge, 2013), The Language of Gaming (Palgrave, 2011), Creating Second Lives: Community, Identity and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual (Routledge, 2011), Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions (Bloomsbury, 2007), and Language in the Media: Representations, Identity, Ideology (Bloomsbury, 2007). She is the Principal Editor of Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds and has led externally funded research projects on digital narrative, language in media, specialized language corpora, and cultural studies. In her previous post at Bangor University she was Deputy Dean (Research) for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

Lai-Tze Fan

Dr. Lai-Tze Fan is an Associate Professor (Cross-Appointed) and is the Canada Research Chair in Technology and Social Change and the Director of the U&AI Lab at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Fan is an interdisciplinary researcher who combines the fields of media studies, science and technology studies, digital storytelling, critical design, and cultural studies. Her research appears in the journals Mosaic, Convergence, Media Theory, and elsewhere.
Fan is also a practitioner of art installations, digital textuality and writing, interactive games, and critical making, with 15 solo and collaborative works of research-creation. With Nick Montfort, she created “Dial” (2020), a generative emoji-embedded poem representing networked, distant communication. With Anne Sullivan and Anastasia Salter, she created Masked Making (2021), a generative work that captures both the imagined making and fragments of text that represent the invisible faces, hands, and labour of women’s mask making during the COVID-19 pandemic. Also of note are video games for children’s health research that Fan helped design with the international Breathing Games Commons, as well as a smart phone application called Global Urban Wilds (2021) that she helped develop for the city of Montréal.
Fan currently serves as an Editor for the open-access journal electronic book review and Editor of the multimodal journal the digital review. She edited a special double issue of both journals called “Critical Making, Critical Design” (September 2021), which was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. She also co-edited a special journal issue of electronic book review on “Canadian Digital Poetics” (February 2021). She is Co-Editor of the collection Post-Digital: Dialogues and Debates from electronic book review (Bloomsbury 2020).

Erika Fülöp

Erika Fülöp is Professor in Lettres Modernes at Université Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès. She previously held a Lectureship in French Studies at the University of Lancaster, a Lectureship at New College, Oxford (2012-13) and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology at the University of Hamburg (2013-15). Since her doctoral thesis and first monograph on Proust and philosophy titled Proust, the One, and the Many: Identity and Difference in À la recherche du temps perdu (Oxford: Legenda, 2012), she has been exploring increasingly recent and increasingly diverse modes of writing and authorship that question and expand the concept of writing and literature, including interferences between print books and networked writing, the impact of social networks on authorship, video writing on YouTube, and digital poetry and its translation. She has run several projects and conferences around these subjects, including Screening the Literary (2016-17) and The Creative Web of Languages (2017-19). In 2020 she completed a monograph co-authored with Gilles Bonnet and Gaëlle Théval on French creative literary experimentation on YouTube (‘Qu’est-ce aue la LittéraTube?’), and in 2021, adventured into learning to code & co. thanks to an EPSRC grant in order to carry out truly interdisciplinary research and analyses of electronic literature. You can find her research and learning diary here.

Caitlin Fisher

Caitlin Fisher directs both the Immersive Storytelling Lab @ Cinespace Studios and the Augmented Reality Lab at York University in Toronto where she is Professor of Cinema and Media Arts in the School of Arts, Media, Performance, and Design and where she was the Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture for over a decade. A co-founder of York’s Future Cinema Lab and a former Fulbright Research Chair, Fisher is the recipient of many international awards for digital storytelling including the Electronic Literature Award for Fiction and the Vinaròs Prize for her AR poetry. In addition to serving as ELO Vice President, she also serves on the international Board of Directors for HASTAC – the Humanities Arts Science Technology Alliance and Collaboratory. She has worked on an AI Storytelling project funded through the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and recently completed a SSHRC project exploring surveillance, Humanistic Intelligence and phenomenological AR for next-generation headsets. She is also co-PI on a New Frontiers grant investigating “Immersive digital environments and indigenous knowledges: co-creation in virtual reality environments to advance artmaking, digital poetics and reconciliation.” She recently directed Fiery Sparks of Light, a volumetric AR project featuring iconic Canadian women poets (Atwood, Brossard, Tolmie, Lubrin). Produced with the participation of Telefilm Canada, ‘Fiery Sparks of Light’ is a CFC Media Lab and York University Immersive Storytelling Lab Co-Production in Partnership with Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry.

Dene Grigar

Dene Grigar is Professor and Director of The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV). She is a curator of media art and electronic literature, creating exhibits for venues and organizations, such as the Library of Congress, the Modern Language Association, the ELO. She is also the author of media art works, such as “Fallow Field: A Story in Two Parts” and “The Jungfrau Tapes: A Conversation with Diana Slattery about The Glide Project,” both of which appeared in Iowa Review Web in October 2004, and When Ghosts Will Die (with Canadian multimedia artist Steve Gibson), a multimedia performance piece that experiments with motion tracking technology to produce narrative. She is also a recipient, with Stuart Moulthrop, of a 2013 NEH Start Up grant for a digital preservation project, entitled Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature and co-author with him on the book entitled, Traversals: The Use of Preservation for Early Electronic Writing. In 2016 she was awarded the Lewis E. and Stella G. Buchanan Distinguished Professorship at WSU. She directs the Electronic Literature Lab at WSUV as well as ELO’s The NEXT, which won the 2022 Open Scholarship Award from the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute.

Davin Heckman

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 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. He is an Associate Professor of Mass Communication at Winona State University.

Reham Hosny

Dr Reham Hosny is an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. She currently serves as an AI advisor at the consultative network of the United Nations Secretary-General’s AI Advisory Body. Dr. Hosny was previously an Assistant Professor in English literature at Minia University, Egypt and a Lecturer at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research focuses on creating links between the well-established western electronic literature communities and the growing digital culture innovators of other underrepresented communities. She is particularly interested in investigating the cultural, social, and political contexts of Arabic and Anglo-American electronic literature. Additionally, she is a creative writer. She is directing arabicelit, the first initiative focusing on globalizing Arabic electronic literature in the English language. She was an international consultant for the ELO’s Electronic Literature Collection 4. She was also a co-organizer of the first international conference on Arabic electronic literature at RIT-Dubai, Feb. 25-27, 2018. She initiated and co-delivered the first electronic literature workshop in the Arab World and co-curated the first electronic literature exhibit in the Arab World at RIT-Dubai in 2018. She initiated the first autobiographical collection of Arab electronic literature authors on the ELMCIP knowledge base in 2015. She is an invited speaker in many international conferences, workshops, and symposiums at different places around the world such as the USA, the UAE, the KSA, Canada, Scotland, Norway, Egypt, Jordan, and the UK. She is a member of different international research networks such as the Intersections, Feminism, Technology & Digital Humanities network (IFTe) funded by UKRI-AHRC and the Irish Research Council. She is also a member of the Global AI Narrative (GAIN) network in the MENA region. Besides her scientific achievements, she received the Ihsan Abdel Quddous Literary Prize for short story writing for her short story collection Amma Ba’d (and thereafter) (2012). She also wrote Al-Barrah (The Announcer), the first Arabic artificial intelligence novel, in collaboration with Mohamed A. Nasef (2019, 2021). For more information, you can visit her personal website.

Claudia Kozak

Claudia Kozak earned a Ph. D. University of Buenos Aires. She is a senior member of the Argentinean National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET); Professor at the Departments of Literature and Communication Studies, University of Buenos Aires. Director of Maestría en Cruces de Narrativas Culturales (UNTREF), which is part of the international program Erasmus + Masters Crossways in Cultural Narratives. She sits at Academic Council Ph. D. in Comparative Theory of Arts (UNTREF), and currently coordinates litElat, Red de Literatura Electrónica Latinoamericana and Ludión. Exploratorio latinoamericano de poéticas/políticas tecnológicas (http://www.ludion.org). Her research focuses on digital literature and relationships between arts, technology and society. She is the author of the book Contra la pared. Sobre graffitis, pintadas y otras intervenciones urbanas (2004). Her other books as editor and author are: Tecnopoéticas argentinas. Archivo blando de arte y tecnología (2012, reprint 2015); Poéticas/políticas tecnológicas en Argentina (1910-2010) (2014); Poéticas tecnológicas, transdisciplina y sociedad. Actas del Seminario Internacional Ludión/Paragraphe (2011); Deslindes. Ensayos sobre la literatura y sus límites en el siglo XX (2006); Las paredes limpias no dicen nada (1991); Rock en letras (1990). Her websites include: Exploratorio Ludión , and Red de Literatura Electrónica Latinoamericana.

Mark C. Marino

Mark C. Marino is an author and critic, working on chatbots and other new media. His writings include Stravinsky’s Muse, Labyrinth, and Living Will. He recently published a book on Critical Code Studies (MIT Press). He is also the editor of Bunk Magazine, an online new media humor magazine. His works-in-progress include the adaptive hypertext novel “a show of hands” (using the Literatronica system) and his web-annotation metafiction, “Marginalia in the Library of Babel,” and The LA Flood Project, a locative narrative about an epic deluge in the City of Angels. His complete portfolio can be found here.) He was co-author on Reading Project (Iowa), which won the N. Katherine Hayles Award. Marino is an Associate Professor (teaching) of Writing at the University of Southern California, where he directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab (HaCCS). Mark is ELO’s Director of Communication, promoting the latest endeavors of ELO. For press inquiries or ELO publicity, please contact him at mark + c + marino {at} g + mail dotted com.

Jason Nelson

Jason Nelson is a digital poet and Professor at the University of Bergen. He co-founded the Interactive Media Research Lab, founded and contributes to editing HyperRhiz: New Media Cultures journal, and is a PI in the Artistic integrated research Node at the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. An incredibly well-regarded practitioner, Nelson has been a finalist or winner of dozens of awards in for new media writing, new media arts, research grants, and book prizes. His most recent academic research will be found in the Handbook of AI and Literature from Bloomsbury, in ACM Digital Library, and in exhibition.

Anastasia Salter

Anastasia Salter is Professor of English and Director of Graduate Programs for the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Central Florida, and Director of the Texts & Technology PhD program. She is the author of ten books on digital culture and platforms, including the forthcoming Undertale (University of Chicago Press, October 2025) and the recent Critical Making in the Age of AI (with Emily Johnson, Amherst College Press, 2025). Her recent projects include the editorial team of the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3 (2016), a curated international collection of electronic literature, and editing the “Inventio” section for Kairos Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, The Journal of Popular Culture, Electronic Book Review, Transformative Works and Cultures, and several other venues.

Alex Saum-Pascual

Alex Saum-Pascual is Associate Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature and New Media at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches Contemporary Spanish Literature and Culture (20th and 21st Centuries) and Electronic Literature (Digital Humanities). She is also part of the Executive Committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media. Her academic work on digital media and literature in the Spanish-speaking world has been published in Spain, Mexico and the United States in the Digital Humanities Quarterly, the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, among others. Her monograph, #Postweb! Crear con la máquina y en la red (Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2018) explores the influence of electronic writing technologies on both printed and born-digital books. As an artist, she is interested in the intersection of female representation in digital media and online spaces as these relate to offline environments in the Anthropocene. Her digital artwork and poetry has been exhibited in galleries and art festivals in the United States and abroad. She is currently a 2020 Poetry Fellow at the Arts Research Center, working on her latest electronic literature work, corporate poetry.

Lyle Skains

Lyle Skains is an Associate Professor in Literary Media and Health & Science Communication at Bournemouth University and an award-winning researcher and creative practitioner in Creative Digital Writing and Science Communication. She conducts practice-based research into writing, reading/playing, publishing digital and transmedia narratives, and how these can be used for health and science communication. Her recent digital fiction includes ‘No World 4 Tomorrow’ for the You & CO2 project, and ‘Only, Always, Never’ for the Infectious Storytelling project; both works were designed to effect social change. She is the founder of Wonderbox Publishing, which publishes speculative digital fiction, aiming to explore innovations in digital and online publishing and creativity. She is also the coordinator of the New Media Writing Prize, and an editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 4. Her digital fiction can be found at lyleskains.com; articles in Convergence, Digital Creativity, and Computers and Composition; and books with Cambridge UP (Digital Authorship), Emerald (Using Interactive Digital Narrative for Health and Science Communication) and Bloomsbury (Neverending Stories: The Popular Emergence of Digital Fiction). Neverending Stories was awarded the N. Katherine Hayles Prize for Criticism in Electronic Literature in 2023 by the Electronic Literature Organization. 

Shanmugapriya T

Shanmugapriya T is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Digital Literature in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT (ISM) Dhanbad. She was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) (2022–2024) and an AHRC Postdoctoral Research Associate at Lancaster University, UK (2020–2021). During her postdoctoral work at Lancaster and UTSC,  she applied digital humanities techniques to study environmental degradation, particularly water systems in Coimbatore, South India, from British colonial times to the present. She created an interactive map using Leaflet and ArcGIS to track the transformation of water tanks in British India’s Coimbatore region and developed Lost Water, Remainscape!, a digital poetry that blends 3D environments, maps, and oral testimonies. She curated her students’ digital-born creative works on her website. Shanmu’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of digital humanities, digital environmental studies, and digital literature, focusing on South Asia, colonial and postcolonial studies, text mining, mapping, and digital-born creative works. She earned her Ph.D. in Indian English Literature and Digital Humanities at the Indian Institute of Technology Indore, India. She is an interim executive committee and Governing Body member of DHARTI, as well as a Research Fellow and member of the Electronic Literature Organization, and was a SPARC Fellow at Lancaster University (2019). She is one of the Peer Reviews Editors of the journal Digital Humanities Quarterly. Shanmu curated the first Indian Electronic Literature Anthology Volume 1 along with Nirmala Menon, Justy Joesph and Deborah Sutton.

Joseph Tabbi

ELD, Founder, the Consortium on Electronic Literature (www.cellproject.net)
Joseph Tabbi is the author of Cognitive Fictions (Minnesota 2002) and Postmodern Sublime (Cornell 1995), books that examine the effects of new technologies on contemporary American fiction. He edits the electronic book review, and has edited and introduced William Gaddis’s last fiction and collected non-fiction (Viking/Penguin). His book, Nobody Grew But the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis (Northwestern) was a finalist for the Society of Midlands Authors Award for Biography & Memoir (2016). Tabbi’s essay on Mark Amerika appeared at the Walker Art Center’s phon:e:me site, a 2000 Webby Award nominee. His edited Handbook of Electronic Literature (Bloomsbury 2018) received the ELO’s N. Katherine Hayles Award for critical writing. He is Professor Emeritus and Node Leader for Electronic Literature at the University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative. Tabbi served as President of the Electronic Literature Organization, 2007-2010.

Rui Torres

Rui Torres is Professor of Communication Sciences at University Fernando Pessoa, Portugal. He was a visiting professor in post-graduation programs in Portugal, Brazil, Estonia, Mexico, and Spain. He is the director of the book series Cibertextualidades (Ed. UFP) and one of the editors of the Electronic Literature Series (Bloomsbury Publishing), and member of several editorial boards and scientific committees of other journals in the field of electronic literature. An author of electronic literature, his poems were published in several Anthologies, CD-ROMs and Digital Archives. He is the coordinator of the Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Poetry His poems, essays, and critical writings are available at https://www.telepoesis.net

Zach Whalen

Zach Whalen is an Associate Professor in Digital Studies at the University of Mary Washington where he teaches courses on creative coding, game studies, graphic novels, and electronic literature. He is the co-editor (with Chris Foss and Jonathan W. Gray) of Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives and (with Laurie N. Taylor) of Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games. In addition to research and writing about electronic literature, Zach is a practitioner of computational creativity including tiny digital poems in Taper, several dozen artistic or literary Twitter bots (all now defunct), and the graphic novel An Arthrogram. He is also an annual contributor to NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month) and a member of the Community Advisory Board for If, Then: Technology and Poetics.